The reversal error is a prevalent phenomenon that consists of reversing the relationship between two variables when writing equations from comparison in verbal language. A study with 169 Basque/Spanish bilingual pre-service teachers examined whether this error is mainly due to the students' tendency to employ a direct-translation strategy based on…

While there is ample evidence that study abroad (SA) enhances oral fluency in a foreign language, the effects of different types of learning context on other aspects of oral skills, such as vocabulary use, have not received much attention in academic research and are less clear. The present study tries to fill this void by investigating lexical…

The aim of the present study is to compare the writing products of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students using accuracy and grammatical complexity as measures. It also aims at examining the development of the morphological, syntactic, lexical, spelling, and punctuation errors committed by these learners when writing in English.…

The objective of this work was to analyze morphosyntactic development in a wide sample of children with Down syndrome (DS) ("n" = 92) and children with typical development (TD) ("n" = 92) with a mental age (MA) of 20 to 29 months. Children were individually matched for gender and MA (Analysis 1) and for vocabulary size…

The main aims of this study were to investigate the relationship between the lexical size and the emergence of morphological and syntactic markers in toddlers between the ages of 16 and 30 months and to compare these results between Galician and European Portuguese. Parents of 3012 Portuguese toddlers and those of 1081 Galician toddlers completed…

The main objective of this research was to analyze the impact of transcription skills of Spanish writers when writing an independently composed sentence within a writing-level design. The free-writing sentence task from the "Early Grade Writing Assessment" (Jiménez, in press) was used to examine the production, accuracy, speed, syntactic…

This study explores morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in 19 Spanish children who received a cochlear implant (CI) before 24 months of age (early CI [e-CI]) and 19 Spanish children who received a CI after 24 months (late CI [l-CI]). They all were in primary school and were compared to a hearing control (HC) group of 19 children. Tests of…

Given that L1A of subject properties in non-null subject languages emerges later than that of null subject languages, this study aims at determining to what extent the same pattern of acquisition is observed in early child L2A in bilingual immersion settings where English and Spanish are both source and target languages. Using an elicited oral…

This study compares focus on form in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and mainstream English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts in the production of a specific morphological feature, the English 3rd person singular present tense marker "-s." Research conducted in CLIL contexts to date examining morphosyntactic features…

A general advantage in proficiency has been repeatedly reported for learners receiving Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) when compared to learners who only receive English lessons. However, fine-grained studies addressing the aspects which make up this general advantage are still scarce. Within this context, this paper concentrates…

In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that…

Context of learning, such as whether a learner studies a second language (L2) in a formal classroom--"at home" or abroad--may be a key factor in developing grammatical and lexical abilities. Yet, little empirical data is available comparing the effects of study abroad (SA) and formal instruction "at home" (AH) experiences on…