We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow…

Previous studies have examined the predictive significance of the level of phonemic awareness in L2 spelling, but have left the role of phonemic awareness growth relatively unexplored. The aims of the present study were to examine (1) the growth trajectory of phonemic awareness in the kindergarten years; and (2) the unique contribution of initial…

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third-grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children's developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2)…

Language attrition research has developed in several clearly delimited phases spanning, roughly, each of the three decades between 1982 and 2012 (see Kopke & Schmid 2004 for a more detailed overview and analysis). The first phase was an era of stocktaking, with a number of symposia, collected volumes and special issues of journals. All of…

A study of the cognitive processes involved in achieving coherence in discourse examined a major factor affecting the accessibility of referents: the length of absence of the referent from the distribution of different types of grammatical referential devices (definite nouns and anaphoric pronouns) in discourse. Six versions of a set of twenty…

Drawing on recent psychological and neurological research on how individual differences might interact with learning a particular language, the study examines how psycholinguistic research and theory can help in assigning military personnel to language training and to a given language. Using the Defense Language Institute's Defense Language…

Research on reading has tried, and failed, to account for wide disparities in reading skill even among children taught by the same method. Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly while others, in the same classroom and taught by the same teacher, don't learn to read at all? In "Language Development and Learning to Read", Diane…