Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at…

The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to…

The present study examines both properties of the language and properties of the learner to better understand variability at the earliest stages of second language (L2) acquisition. We used event-related potentials, an oral production task, and a battery of individual differences measures to examine the processing of number and gender agreement in…

This study examined the development of text complexity for the past 25 years of reading comprehension passages in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) in China. Text complexity of 206 reading passages at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels has been measured longitudinally and compared across the years. The natural language…

Children learning English as an additional language (EAL) are a growing population of learners in English primary schools. These children begin school with differing levels of English language proficiency and tend to underperform in relation to their non-EAL peers on measures of English oral language and reading. However, little work has examined…

The current study aims to make an initial neuroimaging contribution to central implicit-explicit issues in second language (L2) acquisition by considering how implicit and explicit contexts mediate the neural representation of L2. Focusing on implicit contexts, the study employs a longitudinal design to examine the neural representation of L2…

This study investigates pragmatic development among Chinese EFL learners, with reference to accuracy improvement in grammar. Sixty college students in mainland China were pre- and post-tested on their pragmatic and grammatical comprehension and production over one academic year. Their test results were compared with those of 14 native English…

A body of studies, which are mostly based on parental reports, have documented gender differences in early language proficiency, and girls tend to outperform boys in both language production and language comprehension. In this study, staff in Norwegian Early Childhood Education and Care institutions observed language comprehension, word…

This study examined whether 30 learners of Japanese in the United States who engaged in a semester-long video-based eTandem course made gains in global language comprehensibility, that is, ease of understanding (Derwing & Munro, 2009), and what linguistic correlates contributed to these gains. Speech excerpts from Week 2 and 8 of tandem…

Sentence repetition tasks are widely used in the diagnosis and assessment of children with language difficulties. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of sentence repetition tasks and their relationship to other language skills. We present the results from a 2-year longitudinal study of 216 children. Children were assessed on measures of…

The aim of the current study is to determine what language activities Norwegian preschool children took part in, and to examine whether these language activities predict children's language comprehension. We tested children (n = 134) with language measures at age 4/5 and age 5/6 and interviewed their teachers (n = 71) about the kinds of language…

In many languages, significant numbers of words are used in more than one grammatical category; English, in particular, has many words that can be used as both nouns and verbs. Such "ambicategoricality" potentially poses problems for children trying to learn the grammatical properties of words and has been used to argue against the logical…

Han's (2009, 2013) selective fossilization hypothesis (SFH) claims that L1 markedness and L2 input robustness determine the fossilizability (and learnability) of an L2 feature. To test the validity of the model, a pseudo-longitudinal study was designed in which the errors in the argumentative essays of 52 Iranian EFL learners were identified and…

Learning inflectional morphology is a vexing problem for second language (L2) learners. Children acquiring their native language also experience some difficulty, which results in their committing overgeneralization errors. Long after individuals have achieved a high level of proficiency in the L2, they are still plagued by uncertainty when it…

The present longitudinal case study investigated the development of fluency, complexity and accuracy--and the possible relationships between them--in the written production of L2 French. We assessed fluency and complexity in five intermediate learners by means of conventional indicators for written L2 (cf. Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998), while…