Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information-theoretical analysis of a corpus of…

Prior research on pre-task planning examines its effects on the quality of second language (L2) learners' planned output. Planning mitigates the cognitive overload placed upon L2 learners' oral performance, thus improving language production. Despite the pedagogical benefits, studies on pre-task planning on L2 learners' oral output are conducted…

The present study explores the independent and interactive effects of task complexity and task modality on linguistic dimensions of second language (L2) performance and investigates how these effects are modulated by individual differences in working memory capacity. Thirty-two intermediate learners of L2 Spanish completed less and more complex…

Syntactic and linguistic complexity have been studied extensively in applied linguistics as indicators of linguistic performance, development, and proficiency. Recent publications have equally highlighted the reductionist approach taken to syntactic complexity measurement, which often focuses on one or two measures representing complexity at the…

Purpose: The inclusion of an increasing number of high-functioning ASD children in mainstream classrooms demands for adequate awareness of autism and effective teaching methods from teachers to ensure that learning takes places efficiently. Hence, this study investigated the atypical language performance of a high-functioning Malay girl with…

Most studies on task-based language learning focus on the oral performance of advanced level learners of English as a second language (ESL), while little research examines the written performance of beginning language learners in non-ESL contexts. This exploratory study aims to address this gap, by examining the effect of pre-writing tasks on…

Evidence of learning following incidental exposure has been found for aspects of nonnative syntax in adults (Rebuschat & Williams, 2006, 2012; Williams & Kuribara, 2008). However, little research has tested delayed effects of learning under an incidental condition or moved beyond word order. This study investigated learning of third…

One of the intricate properties of second language acquisition is that some types of grammatical feature appear to be acquired easily and in a native-like way, while others remain persistently difficult. There is much evidence related to the issue in the current empirical studies, and the issue raises an important explanatory problem for a theory…

This study investigates the relationship in L2 writing between raters' judgments of communicative adequacy and linguistic complexity by means of six-point Likert scales, and general measures of linguistic performance. The participants were 39 learners of Italian and 32 of Dutch, who wrote two short argumentative essays. The same writing tasks…

Although language experience is a key factor in successful foreign language (FL) learning, many FL learners fail to achieve performance levels that were predicted on the basis of their FL experience. This retrospective study investigated early cognitive and linguistic correlates of learning English as a foreign language (FL) in a group of…

The study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between components of aptitude and the fluency, lexical variety, syntactic complexity, and accuracy of performance in two types of written and spoken narrative tasks. We also addressed the question of how narrative performance varies in tasks of different cognitive complexity in the…

The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic…

The research project reported in this chapter consists of three studies in which syntactic complexity, lexical variation and fluency appear as dependent variables. The independent variables are task complexity and proficiency level, as the three studies investigate the effect of task complexity on the written and oral performance of L2 learners of…

This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124…

Behavioral variation in Broca's aphasia has been characterized as boundless, calling into question the validity of the syndrome-based schema and related diagnostic methods of acquired language disorders. More generally, this putative variability has cast serious doubts on the feasibility of localizing linguistic operations in cortex. We present a…