Vocabulary and grammar are crucial to language proficiency. Certain word families and grammatical categories are differentiated by prosodic features like suprafixes. In English, specific noun/adjective-verb pairs, often called disyllabic words, have primary stress on different syllables: nouns usually receive trochaic stress, while verbs receive…

There is considerable controversy over the factors that shape infants' developing knowledge of grammar. Work with artificial languages suggests that infants' ability to track statistical regularities within the speech they hear could, in principle, support grammatical development. However, little work has tested whether infants' performance on…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to develop a valid and reliable screening tool to identify children with risk of developing language difficulties for Estonian-speaking 2- to 3-year-old children. Method: Nine hundred ninety parents of children ages 1;8-3;1 (years;months) filled in the Estonian MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development…

'Should I talk to my child in a language that I am not good at?' This question reveals the dilemma that many bilingual parents are facing. In the current study, 301 English-Mandarin bilinguals' mothers in Singapore self-evaluated their Mandarin proficiency and we assessed the 4-5 years old children's Mandarin receptive vocabulary and grammar. We…

This study examined Saudis' motivation to learn English after the announcement of the Saudi Vision 2030, a strategic social and economic development plan. The study participants included 175 male and female Saudi citizens aged 18-55 years old. Participants answered a Likert-style survey consisting of 27 statements. Their answers were analyzed…

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…

The ratio of women to men is 4 to 1 in beginning university Spanish courses, and this gap widens the higher the level of instruction (Chavez 2001). Prior experiments on reading in Spanish show that the interaction of readers' gender and passage content plays a significant role with learners at the intermediate levels, but not at advanced levels of…

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2…

The present study is a quantitative research that attempts to scrutinize the place of students' views on integrating contextual micro-grammar revision with contextual vocabulary teaching consistent with Constructivism. Therefore, the study investigates the first and the second-year students' attitudes towards a new technique that attempts to…

The results from a large-scale study on toddlers' language acquisition in European Portuguese are presented. Toddlers' lexical and grammatical competencies were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results, based on 3012 reports completed by parents, indicate an increase in the lexical…

This systematic review study sought to examine the teaching of English language skills in Saudi Arabia by systematically analyzing the previous studies on language skills which were published within the past ten years and identify the research areas to be bridged in the future. The study employed the systematic review approach. The search strategy…

These days focus of interest in English learning changes to productive skills, in Turkey. This research study assesses the teachers' point of view about using ice-breakers for adult Turkish EFL learners in upper-intermediate level. It also anticipates finding valuable information with applying ice-breaker activities as a useful teaching policy…

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform…

This article presents results from a large population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, comprising 6574 children between 8 and 36 months. Data were collected via the Internet. In accordance with similar studies from other languages,…

This study has been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using poetry to teach vocabulary in a foreign language classroom. It aims to find answers to two research questions (1) "Do the learners enhance more extensive vocabulary knowledge by means of poetry-based vocabulary teaching activities than the traditional coursebook…