Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children's picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which…

Purpose: When researchers investigate figurative language abilities (including idioms) in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), syntax abilities may be more important than once considered. In addition, there are limitations to the overreliance on false-belief tasks to measure theory of mind (TOM) abilities. In the current study, the…

This qualitative study investigates discourse-level patterns typically employed by a Turkish lecturer based on the syntactic patterns found in the collected data. More specifically, the study aims to reveal how different native and non-native speakers of English perceive discourse patterns used by a non-native lecturer teaching in English. The…

This study investigates intergroup homogeneity within high intermediate and advanced L2 writers of English from Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish first language backgrounds. A variety of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion were used to compare texts written by L1 speakers of English to L2…

Researchers have claimed that recasts might be ambiguous as feedback. Because recasts serve a dual function, as both feedback and conversational response, learners might not always interpret them as feedback (e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997). This study explores how learners interpret recasts they notice (as responses to content, negative evidence,…

This article is a contrastive study of the devices Russian and German dispose of in order to designate a receptacle with content and without it. The German opposition "Wodkaflasche-Flasche Wodka" is represented in Russian by four constructions: relational adjective, genitive, and prepositional forms ("s" and "iz-pod"). (SW)

An editorialized report of data accumulated in a study of current American practice in the treatment of problems of usage in general purpose dictionaries. Their descriptive objectivity is characterized as "that of the blind men examining the elephant." Such practices reveal little change from that of Samuel Johnson's 1755 English…

Dutch elements may be identified in Papiamentu, the Afro-Iberian Creole of Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire. (DS)

This article discusses Aronoff's (1976) theory of the lexicon and states that the theory must be modified to describe a more richly inflected language, such as French. A more comprehensive theory of the lexicon is then outlined. (NCR)

Discusses problems of terminology in modern-day French-English translation, and means by which translator skills can keep up with linguistic evolution. (Text is in French.) (AM)

FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FICTIONAL PROSE STYLE WERE STUDIED THROUGH SYSTEMATIC AND OBJECTIVE ANALYSES OF NOVELISTIC SYNTAX AND VOCABULARY. SAMPLE PASSAGES FROM THE MAJOR NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN, THE BRONTE SISTERS, AND GEORGE ELIOT AS WELL AS NOVELS BY 13 OTHER AUTHORS WERE ANALYZED. INFORMATION ON PASSAGE SENTENCES, CLAUSES, AND WORDS WAS…