A hallmark of grammatical knowledge is the ability to parse novel syntactic structures. Previous artificial language studies have examined learning hierarchical structures, but few have involved meaningful language and shown generalization to novel structures. This study addressed this issue using the semiartificial language paradigm. The…

An experiment was conducted to investigate methods that enable college students to learn the meaning of unknown words as they read discipline-specific academic text. Forty-one college students read specific passages aloud during three sessions. Participants were randomly assigned to three vocabulary learning interventions or a control condition.…

The objective of this chapter is to explore the relevance of cognitive linguistics for teaching [noun] + [noun] constructions to French learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), and more specifically, for process engineering. After a review of research on Compound Nouns (CNs) and explicit versus implicit learning, three basic tenets of…

Background: Children who do not produce single words by the expected age have been described as "late talkers" or as demonstrating "late language emergence" (LLE). Although their short-term growth in vocabulary is often strong, longer-term consequences of LLE remain in dispute. It has been argued that the majority of school-age…

The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a…

Purpose: This study investigated the clinical effectiveness of monolingual versus bilingual language intervention, the latter involving speech-language pathologist-parent collaboration. The study focuses on methods that are currently being recommended and that are feasible within current clinical contexts. Method: Bilingual children with primary…

This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic…

Lexicon Pirate was originally developed as a strategy intervention programme to treat lexical disorders of pre-school children. To evaluate the therapy's effectiveness for school-age students, a randomized controlled trial (RCT, N = 157) was conducted. Based on a pre--post-test design, the programme's impacts were compared with a control group…

This study aimed to investigate the capacity of coordinating comprehension and production processes and the role of phonological working memory in simultaneous interpreting. To this end we evaluated the Articulatory Suppression (AS) effect in three groups of participants, monolingual controls, students of interpreting and professional…

Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual…

This study explored the effect of thiamine deficiency during early infancy on the development of syntax and lexical retrieval. We tested syntactic comprehension and production, lexical retrieval abilities and conceptual abilities of 59 children aged 5-7 years who had been fed during their first year of life with a thiamine-deficient milk…

Language impairment is a common core feature in Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Many studies have tried to define the specific language profiles of these disorders, some claiming the existence of overlaps, and others conceiving of them as separate categories. Fewer have sought to determine whether…

With Russian as the target language, a proof of concept study was undertaken to determine whether it is possible to identify linguistic features, control over which is implicated in progress on the Interagency Linguistic Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale, thereby better to inform the instructional process. Following its development in an…

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…

Online translation (OT) sites such as Free Translation and Babel Fish are freely available to the general public and purport to convert inputted text, from single words to entire paragraphs, instantly from one language to another. Discussion in the literature about OT for second-language (L2) acquisition has generally focused either on the…