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…

Gender is considered as one of the important variables that effects learner motivation in second or foreign language acquisition. It is also believed that learner motivation has an impact on learner performance as well. Using the expectancy-value theory model of achievement motivation, this study aimed at exploring (1) the impact of gender…

For many language learners, studying a foreign language is a compulsory, high-stakes activity. It is perhaps for this reason that positive feelings about language learning are rarely mentioned in the literature on language learning. The focus is predominantly on negative feelings: the anxiety caused by being asked to speak in the foreign language…

The aim of the present study was to analyze early vocalization development, the predictive value of this development in terms of later language skills, and possible gender difference in early vocalization development in a selected cohort of 32 very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) children and 35 full-term controls. The data on early vocalization…

This paper reports on a focused investigation into the immediate effects of oral narrative task repetition by two adult EFL learners of intermediate and high proficiency. Two participants performed a narrative speaking task after watching a cartoon video clip and repeated their performance three times, followed by a retrospective report in an…

Assessments developed and field tested for the mainstream student population may not be accessible for students with disabilities (SWDs) as a result of the impact of extraneous variables, including cognitive features, such as depth of knowledge required, grammatical and lexical complexity, lexical density, and textual/visual features. This study…

Much research on the quality of child care reveals it--in the case of low-quality child care--to be related to poorer child functioning, net of confounding factors, perhaps especially in the case of cognitive-linguistic performance. Recent work using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early…

The "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" ("ESEA"), as amended by the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" inaugurated important changes in assessment and accountability for English Learner (EL) students. Specifically, Title III of the law required states to develop or adopt English-language proficiency (ELP)…

Based on Adaptation Theory, the article analyzes the production process of hedges. The procedure consists of the continuous making of choices in linguistic forms and communicative strategies. These choices are made just for adaptation to the contextual correlates. Besides, the adaptation process is dynamic, intentional and bidirectional.

This article presents a cognitively-oriented account of the qualitative differences between ENL (English as a native language) and ELF (English as a lingua franca) users. Based on the declarative-procedural model of second language acquisition, it examines the linguistic and sociolinguistic implications of ELF users' dependence on their…

By the end of their studies, non-native speakers of English studying at English-medium universities have had several years of exposure to English in that setting. Do non-native students, particularly those enrolled in non-language related programs, show different levels of second language (L2) speaking ability in their final semester of studies…

In this paper we discuss a computational cognitive model of children's poor performance on pronoun interpretation (the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect, or DPBE). This cognitive model is based on a theoretical account that attributes the DPBE to children's inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker's perspective. The cognitive…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population. Method: The BEL sentences were presented…

This study investigated how task complexity affected native and non-native speakers' speaking performance in terms of a measure of communicative success (functional adequacy), three types of fluency (breakdown fluency, speed fluency, and repair fluency), and lexical diversity. Participants (208 non-native and 59 native speakers of Dutch) carried…

Relatively recently, experimental studies of linguistic processing speed in children who stutter (CWS) have emerged, some of which suggest differences in performance among CWS compared to children who do not stutter (CWNS). What is not yet well understood is the extent to which underlying cognitive skills may impact performance on timed tasks of…