Each language has its unique way to mark grammatical information such as gender, number and tense. For example, English marks number and tense/aspect information with morphological suffixes (e.g., -"s" or -"ed"). These morphological suffixes are crucial for language acquisition as they are the basic building blocks of syntax,…

Purpose: This study explores the roles of morphological skills (Morphological Awareness, Morphological-Syntactic-Knowledge,Morphological-Semantic-Knowledge, and Morphological-Orthographic/Phonological-Knowledge), vocabulary (knowledge of definitions, relationships between words, and polysemous meanings), and syntax in contributing to adolescent…

Purpose: This study explores the roles of morphological skills (Morphological Awareness, Morphological-Syntactic-Knowledge, Morphological-Semantic-Knowledge, and Morphological-Orthographic/Phonological-Knowledge), vocabulary (knowledge of definitions, relationships between words, and polysemous meanings), and syntax in contributing to adolescent…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of…

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the…

Background: Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. Aims: To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group…

The current study examined lexical aspects of second language (L2) speech attainment in the foreign language (FL) classroom setting (i.e., several hours of target language input per week). A total of 72 second-year university students with 7 years of FL study and no experience abroad participated in the study. Their spontaneous speech was analyzed…

While there is ample evidence that study abroad (SA) enhances oral fluency in a foreign language, the effects of different types of learning context on other aspects of oral skills, such as vocabulary use, have not received much attention in academic research and are less clear. The present study tries to fill this void by investigating lexical…

The paper describes initial efforts on creating a system for the automatic assessment of Swedish second language (L2) learner essays from two points of view: holistic evaluation of the reached level according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), and the lexical analysis of texts for receptive and productive vocabulary per CEFR…

The current study examined the proficiency of Israeli adolescents in reading single words in English, which is taught as a foreign language, and what language skills predict individual variability. Parallel measures of word reading, phonology, decoding, morpho-syntax and vocabulary in Hebrew and English were administered to 217 adolescents in 8th…

The present study investigated language skills and reading comprehension with English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2-5. Of the 377 children in the sample, 207 were English monolingual and 170 were Spanish-English bilingual. Data were collected within a cohort-sequential design for two academic years in the fall and…

Language skill attrition refers to the loss of any language or portion of a language whether it be the declining use of mother tongue skills, the replacement of one language by another in language contact situations, the deterioration of language in the neurologically impaired or elderly, or the death of whole languages. In this paper, language…

This paper focuses on the current developments in regard to the assessment of language proficiency in children who are from non-English speaking backgrounds. Instruments currently used to assess language proficiency for placement in English programs usually fail validity and reliability tests. These tests usually measure formal aspects of language…

This paper examines: (1) the use of questions by children at different levels of proficiency in Spanish and English, and (2) the congruency between the language constructs used to measure language proficiency and the natural language repertoire of children as seen in video-tapes of classroom interaction. A quantitative analysis of the data…