An analysis of data collected from 2347 users of English on their self-reported swearing behaviour in English revealed significant higher values for the 1159 native English (L1) users than for the 1165 English foreign language (LX) users. Parallel analyses on the data of the L1 and LX users revealed that the interlocutor effect was slightly…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

The focus of this paper is on the relationship between Albanian speakers' ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) perceptions and their language maintenance, language use and choice patterns. A subjective EV questionnaire, and a language usage questionnaire capturing domain-specific language use was completed by 200 Albanian immigrants of first and second…

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among…

Purpose: In this study, the authors sought to determine whether a combination of English-language measures and a parent questionnaire on first-language development could adequately discriminate between English-language learners (ELLs) with and without language impairment (LI) when children had diverse first-language backgrounds. Method:…

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…

For more than 50 years, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been conducting comparative studies of educational achievement in a number of curriculum areas, including mathematics and science. TIMSS 2011 represents the fifth cycle of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS),…