This article reports on a study in which stimulated recall data and quantitative measures of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) were used to address three interconnected questions in different planning conditions: (1) how learners share their limited attentional capacity with different cognitive processes of 'planner/proposer', 'translator'…

Prepositional phrases (PPs) are considered an important feature of mature written expression. However, little is known about the development of PPs during the school years. The study examined the use of PPs in 160 narrative and expository texts, written by Hebrew-users in grades 4, 7, and 11, and adults. PPs were identified, counted, and…

Background: Children diagnosed with intellectual difficulties experience difficulties with narrative skills, due to limited syntactic knowledge. The Colourful Semantics approach with thematic roles and a colour coding system may encourage syntactic development in children experiencing intellectual disabilities. Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness…

Task repetition facilitates learners' performance, at least temporarily: Since learners are already familiar with the content of the task at the initial enactment, they are capable of focusing their attention on linguistic form during the following enactment. However, the analysis in previous studies treated various aspects of "form" as…

This study examined the validity and reliability of different measures of morphosyntactic complexity, including the Morphosyntactic Complexity Scale (MSCS), a novel adaptation of the Developmental Sentence Scoring, in French-speaking school-aged children. Seventy-three Quebec children from kindergarten to Grade 3 completed a definition task and a…

This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7-2;3) and a subsequent…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…