This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…

Compares the cognitive processing of 12 anglophone French students who wrote an argumentative text in their first language (English) and second language (L2) (French). Results indicate that the writers' strategic knowledge and capacity for meaningful multiple-level discourse processing explains the constraining effects of linguistic processing on…

Describes communication difficulties of students with unspecified learning difficulties affecting their ability to access education through spoken and written language. Describes a collaborative project between the school, the special needs teaching service, and the University of Leicester which aims to clarify such pupil problems and evaluate…

The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically…

Research in first language and second language (L2) comprehension has demonstrated that both learner and input variables contribute to the ease with which a message is understood. Questions remain, however, as to how these variables affect the way L2 learners process linguistic form during comprehension. This study examines how one learner…

The purpose of the current investigation was to determine if the experimental analysis of antecedent variables conducted in English and in Spanish would identify effective and ineffective instructions for response accuracy for Spanish-speaking English language learners. An antecedent variable (i.e., directive complexity) arranged in a hierarchical…

The role of grammatical knowledge in second language (L2) lexical processing is far from clear. Providing evidence from a recent introspective study, this paper seeks to demonstrate the significant contribution that such knowledge can make to inferring the meanings of unfamiliar words while reading, and to possible consequent acquisition of L2…

Purpose: There is a substantial minority of children for whom lexical retrieval problems impede the normal pattern of language development and use. These problems include accurately producing the correct word even when the word's meaning is understood. Such problems are often referred to as "word-finding difficulties" (WFDs). This article examines…

Purpose: Recent research suggests that nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks can be used to discriminate between children with SLI and their typically developing age-matched (TDAM) and younger (TDY) peers. Method: Fourteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and 30 of their TDAM and TDY peers were compared on NWR and SR…

Debate continues over the hypothesis that children with language or literacy difficulties have a genuine auditory processing deficit. Several recent studies have reported deficits in frequency discrimination (FD), but it is unclear whether these are genuine perceptual impairments or reflective of the comorbid attentional problems that exist in…

The discussion of bilingualism and bilingual education focuses on three common concerns: (1) whether children will suffer if they become bilingual; (2) whether they will suffer from education using two languages; and (3) whether bilingualism and bilingual education are more successful when chosen or when imposed on a population. The three…

A study examines the past-tense inflection process for native and non-native speakers of English. Subjects, ten native speakers of standard British English and ten proficient non-native speakers of English, were tested for responses to pseudo-irregular and -regular verbs according to their phonological distance (i.e., prototypicality) to known…

A study of Japanese learners' acquisition of the article system in English noun phrases investigated whether (1) presence or absence of a modifier affected the choice of definite article used, and (2) whether the choice of definite article was influenced by reliance on knowledge of commonly-occurring sequences. Subjects were 111 Japanese…

An approach to teaching top-down comprehension of spoken language in business Spanish instruction is presented. The approach is based on a model of reading comprehension using successful reading strategies that use-top-down processing, and relies on development of learners' understanding of certain important concepts they will encounter in…

Listening is a critical element in the competent language performance of adult second language learners. Listening is a demanding process, because of both the process itself and factors that characterize the listener, speaker, message content, and any accompanying visual support. The speaker's use of colloquial language and reduced forms,…