"School-Age Language Intervention: Evidence-based Practices" explains how to teach the language and literacy skills, strategies, and underlying processes needed for educational success. This book brings together an array of experts to provide the latest practical and evidence-based guidance to school speech-language pathologists.…

This paper reports a longitudinal investigation into the productive vocabulary development in the written Chinese of the Cantonese-speaking elementary children in Hong Kong. Data gathering took place using two vocabulary tests which selected prescriptive vocabulary from the textbooks and the 2007 Vocabulary List. The two assessment tests also…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

We report on the case of an elderly bilingual woman presenting with a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia. The participant's native language was Friulian (L1), a predominantly oral Romance language, and her second language was Italian (L2), formally learned at primary school in oral and written forms. We investigated her linguistic abilities…

I describe the results of an experiment that bears on how children learn the lexical and syntactic properties of abstract verbs ("seem," "try") in order to distinguish the subclasses of raising ("seem") and control verbs ("try"). Previous research suggested that an inanimate subject in certain contexts leads children to suppose that the subject…

The aim of this study was to measure the pattern of hand preferences for pointing gestures as a function of object-manipulation handedness in 123 infants and toddlers (10-40 months). The results showed that not only right-handers but also left-handers and ambidextrous participants tended to use their right hand for pointing. There was a…

The aim of this article is to give an up-to-date picture of study of the role of the background languages (the first language, L1, and the second language, L2) in third language (L3) acquisition, mainly in the two areas of vocabulary and syntax. These seem to be the two linguistic levels on which there has so far been most research concerning…

Previous studies on the second language acquisition of telicity have suggested that learners can use morphosyntactic cues to interpret sentences as telic or atelic even in cases where the cues differ in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) (Slabakova, 2001, 2005; Gabriele, 2008; Kaku et al., 2008a, 2008b). The present study extends…

Minimally verbal children with autism commonly demonstrate language dysfunction, including immature syntax acquisition. We hypothesised that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) should facilitate language acquisition in a cohort (n = 10) of children with immature syntax. We modified the English version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT)…

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an integrated phoneme awareness/speech intervention in comparison to an alternating speech/morphosyntax intervention for specific areas targeted by the different interventions, as well as the extent of indirect gains in nontargeted areas. Method: A total of 30 children with co-occurring…

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences.…

Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

In the 1980s, researchers in child language devised several new experimental techniques to assess children's emerging linguistic competence. Innovations in methodology were needed to bridge the apparent gap between the expectation of rapid language acquisition, based on linguistic theory, and the protracted acquisition that was being witnessed…

The study explains the process of learners' listening comprehension within Halliday's information theory in functional grammar, including the skills of identifying focuses while listening in college English teaching. Identifying information focuses in listening is proved to improve the students' communicative listening ability by the means of a…

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the…