Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

The present study investigated the impact of chunk reading training (CRT) on the online syntactic processing and verbal working memory (WM) of Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in secondary school. For four weeks, the treatment group (N = 31) underwent CRT, while the control group (N = 25) participated in reading training in…

Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first language (L1) to L2. While evidence seems to suggest that there are significant L1-L2 differences in the processing of RCs, relatively little is known about the source of non-target-like L2…

Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The aim is to delineate how the linguistic and extra-linguistic context affects referent accessibility to the speaker. The study also examines…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

Four picture-description experiments investigated if syntactic formulation in language production can proceed with only minimal working memory involvement. Experiments 1-3 compared the initiation latencies, utterance durations, and errors for syntactically simpler picture descriptions (adjective-noun phrases, e.g., "the red book") to…

Prior research showed that interleaved practice (studying multiple skills at once) is more effective than blocked practice (studying only one skill at a time). This study aims to replicate the benefits of interleaved practice on the proceduralization of second language (L2) syntax and further examines the role of working memory (WM) in different…

Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

This article investigates verbal short-term memory (vSTM) and verbal working memory (vWM) abilities and their relation to lexical and syntactic abilities in monolingual (mono-) and bilingual (bi-) children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical development (TD). The authors employed the following tasks: vSTM (non-word repetition…

Working memory (WM) limitations are frequently reported for children with specific learning disorder (SLD). However, WM capacity influences more than literacy and numeracy, as research highlights the contribution of WM to language development, in particular syntax. In this article, the authors study the effect of syntactic intervention, i.e.…

The extent to which learners benefit from instruction may be largely dependent on their individual abilities. However, there is relatively little work on the interaction between instructional effectiveness in second language learning and learner individual factors. In this study, we investigated the relationship between instruction, individual…

This dissertation investigates processing of English and Japanese relative clause (RC) sentences by native speakers and second/foreign language (L2) learners. Particularly, the relationship between the sentence processing and individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity was examined. The main question addressed in this study is whether…