Dual language learners (DLLs) and the various educational programs that serve them are increasing in number across the country. This framework lays out a conceptual approach for dual language assessment tasks designed to measure the language and literacy skills of young DLLs entering kindergarten in the United States. Although our examples focus…

According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns' gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4- to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender…

This paper presents a framework for incorporating the assessment of psycholinguistic constructs into spoken language proficiency testing. Although response time and automaticity of language processing are vital factors in language acquisition, as constructs they are rarely explicitly assessed in language tests. It is proposed that efficiency of…

Nineteen shy, twenty-three middle and twenty-five non-shy junior kindergarten children were assessed at school by an unfamiliar examiner, and at home where their parents administered a parallel form of the expressive and receptive vocabulary tests given at school. A speech sample between the child and parent was also collected at home. Shy…

The present study is an examination of the contribution of bilingualism to trilingualism, namely the influence of learning two different orthographies on learning a third. The participants were two groups of sixth graders from Israeli schools who were studying English as a foreign (second or third) language: Russian Israeli children for whom…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) lag behind children with typical language (TL) in their grammatical development, despite equivalent early exposure to recasts in conversation (M. E. Fey, T. E. Krulik, D. F. Loeb, & K. Proctor-Williams, 1999) and the ability to learn from recasts in intervention as quickly as do children…

In vocabulary testing, whether to adopt context is a heat-debated topic. In the article, an experiment is designed to investigate what is the effect of zero context and sentence context on the vocabulary testing? And how do the different kinds of context in vocabulary affect the subjects' performance? The experimental result demonstrates that…

The Test of Language Competence-Expanded Edition (TLC-E) was administered to children and adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Relative to controls, those with ASD were less competent on a range of TLC-E tasks. No differences were found for either child or adult ASD groups on any of the TLC-E measures when re-classified as…

A list of 1,036 terms and definitions used in native and second language acquisition and instruction, linguistics, language testing, and bicultural-multicultural education, including identical items with different meanings, is presented. The terms were derived from manual searches of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics and ERIC…

Greek has two verbs of agency that can be used interchangeably to mean "to look for." Examined whether children will obey the principle of contrast to diagnose that one verb is mentalistic and the other is to be construed behaviorally. A study of mothers' verb use confirmed that the verb preferred in home use gave below chance performance on a…

As the English article system is one of the most difficult grammatical items for Japanese learners of English to acquire (Japanese has no article system), this paper explored the accuracy order of articles in English by 141 Japanese speakers. A secondary purpose was to examine if these second language results extend Cziko's 1986 proposal that…

By analyzing different language tests currently in use for elementary school children, the article criticizes psychometric means of evaluation and ideas about language and language acquisition resulting from psychometric evaluation. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Eighty unimpaired adults took the iconic-symbolic (I-S) subtest of the Muma Assessment Program under traditional protocols and revised instructions like those used in classic studies of classification ability. Only 18 functioned at the symbolic level as defined by the protocols; revised instructions more frequently evoked the expected symbolic…

Language comprehension performance on the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language (TACL) was investigated using three modes of test administration with 24 four-year-old children representing various categories of cognitive tempo. Results indicated that all Ss had similar expressive language abilities. (Author/SB)