Writing a topic sentence is difficult, as a variety of linguistic knowledge is required to represent the main idea of the whole paragraph. This study applies the mechanism of A-movement in generative syntax to observe syntactic structures, semantic denotations and pragmatic aspects of topic sentences in applied linguistics research articles. The…

Purpose: This systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis examines the accuracy of sentence repetition (SR) tasks in distinguishing between typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). It explores variation in the way that SR tasks are administered and/or evaluated and examines whether variability…

Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

Researchers' investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts' rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by…

Purpose: Twenty years ago, von Hapsburg and Peña (2002) wrote a tutorial that reviewed the literature on speech audiometry and bilingualism and outlined valuable recommendations to increase the rigor of the evidence base. This review article returns to that seminal tutorial to reflect on how that advice was applied over the last 20 years and to…

Ten morphological awareness intervention studies, conducted in English with students in kindergarten through 12th grade between 2008 and 2020, were synthesized in this article. Research in the studies focused on the effects of morphological awareness intervention on literacy outcomes of students who struggle with reading and writing--including…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

Being able to write a sentence is an essential part of overall writing proficiency, but this can be a challenge for many students. This article provides a systematic review of the extant literature on sentence-writing instruction. Sixteen studies designed to improve sentence writing for students who are typically achieving or have disabilities or…

This study examined givenness in discourse via passive constructions in research articles. While it is commonly held in grammar books and grammar classes that the passive voice is the counterpart of the active voice, the present study argues that Argument movement in passive constructions can act as a syntactic device contributing to sound…

Purpose: This meta-analysis synthesizes published studies using "treatment of underlying forms" (TUF) for sentence-level deficits in people with aphasia (PWA). The study aims were to examine group-level evidence for TUF efficacy, to characterize the effects of treatment-related variables (sentence structural family and complexity;…

This systematic review synthesizes the literature (involving 62 empirical studies) regarding the effectiveness of cognitive linguistics-inspired language pedagogies (CL-ILPs) on second language (L2) learning. It begins with an overview of the main theoretical tenets of cognitive linguistics followed by a description of the data selection, coding,…

Syntactic complexity has been recognized as an important construct in writing research, and for the past five decades, many syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) have been examined in numerous studies. This systematic review is the first study of its kind to synthesize 36 studies spanning from 1970 to 2019 by identifying and cataloging all SCMs…

Lexical bundles are recurrent multiword combinations and often function as discourse building blocks. Lexical bundles have been analysed in university students' writing to detect linguistic errors, measure writing competence, and investigate the divergence between L1 and L2 writing. Few studies, however, have focused on the high-stakes genre of…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade…

We examined effects of intervention on the level and trend of text-writing sequences of students with disabilities and writing difficulties, in addition to potential moderating effects related to student demographics (i.e., disability status, age, gender, and race) and writing task (i.e., sentence, essay, and narrative). We reviewed 18 single-case…