This investigation examined the existence of interconnectedness between developing linguistic subsystems. Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 31 typically-developing Greek-speaking toddlers across two age levels, at 28 and 36 months. Correlational analyses were performed synchronically and predictively, revealing significant positive…

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the…

This study examines associations between writing instruction with a focus on explicit sentence syntax and reading comprehension in a sample of students receiving special education services. While the outcome data does not show direct causation between student enrollment in a treatment writing course using Systemic Functional Linguistics and…

Purpose: This study examined the relationship between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and the probability of making an error at the utterance level. Method: The participants in this study included 830 Spanish-speaking first graders who were learning English at school. Story retells in both Spanish and English were collected from all…

Extending previous findings on adult L2 learners' integration of verbal and constructional information, this study investigated how child learners of English as a foreign language produce verbs in target constructions and whether (a) receptive skills and (b) the specific production modality (spoken versus written) modulate the integration process.…

Research has suggested the important role of vocabulary knowledge in second language (L2) speaking proficiency. However, earlier studies tended to disregard the congruence in test format between assessing vocabulary knowledge and speaking skills with the former predominantly measured in written format. The current study measured vocabulary…

This study examined early Hebrew verb acquisition, highlighting CDS-CS relations across inflectional and derivational verb learning. It was carried out on a corpus of longitudinal dense dyadic interactions of two Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1;8-2;2 and their parents. Findings revealed correlated patterns within and between CDS and CS corpora in…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

The study investigates which grammar features need high priority of pedagogical intervention to develop implicit knowledge, unlike grammatical features in need of explanation of explicit rules. Two types of data were collected from 29 Korean college students: a sentence completion test in English and a meta-linguistic knowledge test (requiring…

This study employed a multisite design to investigate the differential impact of deductive and guided inductive instruction for second language (L2) grammar development in ecologically valid classroom contexts. Students (n = 138) from eight intact third-year L2 Spanish classes in three public high schools in the United States received deductive…

The factors that influence rater scoring have been a subject of great interest to researchers in second language assessment. However, the research on the impact of test-takers' speech profiles (e.g., a jagged or a flat profile reflecting analytic subscores) on raters' scoring behaviors remains to be seen. To investigate the role of speech profiles…

The goals of this study were to analyze the growth and stability of vocabulary, mean length of the three longest utterances (MLLUw), and sentence complexity in European Portuguese-speaking children aged 1;4-2;6, to explore differences in growth as a function of personal and family-related variables, and to investigate the inter-relationships among…

Purpose: This study evaluated interrater reliability (IRR) and test-retest stability (TRTS) of seven linguistic measures (percent correct information units, relevance, subject-verb-[object], complete utterance, grammaticality, referential cohesion, global coherence), and communicative success in unstructured conversation and in a story narrative…

Speech fluency has been extensively researched as a core construct for second language (L2) speaking assessment. Despite the broad consensus on its multifaceted nature, few researchers have empirically explored the dimensionality of this construct. Operationalizations of fluency vary across research and practice, using both holistic and…

Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing interest in third language (L3) phonology (Cabrelli Amaro, 2012; Cabrelli Amaro & Wrembel, 2016). However, research so far has been primarily directed at specific stages of learning and has independently explored either production (e.g., Llama, Cardoso, & Collins, 2010; Llama &…