This contribution investigates gains in technical economy in measuring language ability by considering one recurrent interest of JD Brown: cloze tests. In the various versions of the Test of Academic Literacy Levels (TALL), its Sesotho and Afrikaans (Toets van Akademiese Geletterdheidsvlakke -- TAG) counterparts, as well as related other tests…

We investigated age-related decline in adult learning of Dutch as an additional language (Ln) in speaking, writing, listening, and reading proficiency test scores for 56,024 adult immigrants with 50 L1s who came to the Netherlands for study or work. Performance for all four language skills turned out to decline monotonically after an age of…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

We aimed to investigate stress response regulation, temperament, cognitive and language abilities and family SES in children who entered kindergarten before two years of age. Whilst childrens stress regulatory systems are vulnerable to environmental influences little is known about how temperament and family characteristics impact on stress…

This study examines the relationship between different types of language learning aptitude (measured via the LLAMA test) and adult second language (L2) learners' attainment in speech production in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. Picture descriptions elicited from 50 Japanese EFL learners from varied proficiency levels were analyzed…

Metalinguistic skills are highlighted in the literature as providing bilinguals with an advantage in additional language (L3) learning. The extent to which this may apply to bilingual education and content-and-language-integrated-learning settings, however, is as yet little understood. This article reports on a study exploring and comparing the…

Background: Contemporary adolescents use e-mail for a variety of purposes, including peer communication and education. Research into these uses has focused on typically developing individuals; much less is known about the use of e-mail by exceptional youth. Aims: The present study examined the structure and form of e-mail messages sent by…

Background: It is recognized that children from areas associated with socioeconomic disadvantage are at an increased risk of delayed language development. However, so far research has focused mainly on young children and there has been little investigation into language development in adolescence. Aims: To investigate the language abilities of…

The presence or absence of clinically delayed language development prior to 3 years of age is a key, but contentious, clinical feature distinguishing autism from Asperger's disorder. The aim of this study was to examine language processing in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger's disorder (AD) using a task which taps lexical…

The central question in this study is whether the language and math delays of the different socio-economic and ethnic minority groups targeted by Dutch educational disadvantage policy have diminished or not. Data are from the years 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2008. Information from a total of 90,000 pupils in Grades 2 and 8 was selected to represent the…

When two or more languages are part of a child's world, we are presented with a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. In this book, Norbert Francis examines the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of competence that come together in making up its component parts. In…

We present one of the first behavior-genetic studies of individual differences in school students' levels of achievement in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). We assessed these language abilities in Australian twin pairs (maximum N pairs = 251) by means of teacher ratings, class rankings, and self-ratings of proficiency, and used the…

This paper identifies differences between the three ethnic groups, namely, Kadazans/Dusuns, Bajaus, and other minority ethnic groups on the beliefs about learning English as a second language based on the five variables, that is, language aptitude, language learning difficulty, language learning and communicating strategies, nature of language…

The dissertation project is a study of how childrens' increasingly skillful use of certain language forms ("stance forms") help them to more effectively perform culturally salient social identities in discourse. Although scholars have long claimed that language use helps to position speakers in terms of socially recognizable identities,…

The primary purpose of this study was to establish whether contrasting teaching methods had an effect on performance accuracy in the recall of graphic symbols. The secondary purpose was to establish whether the iconicity of symbols had an effect on performance accuracy. A direct symbol-teaching method and a contextual symbol-teaching method were…