We still know surprisingly little about how grammatical structures are selected for use in sentence production. A major debate concerns whether structural selection is competitive or noncompetitive. Competitive accounts propose that alternative structures or structural components actively suppress one another's activation until one option reaches…

Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency,…

This study was designed to investigate whether contemporary corpus-informed grammar textbooks written for English language learners and teachers presented the progressive use of stative verbs and if yes, which stative verbs were presented to occur with the progressive aspect and for which functions they took this aspect. A corpus of six electronic…

Purpose: This study examined the extent to which children born preterm (< 37 weeks) and/or who have low birth weight (< 2,500 g) catch up with their full term peers in terms of their language abilities at early school age (= 5 to < 9 years). Method: A systematic literature search identified empirical studies that fit the inclusion…

The following exploratory study examines the effects of a "Harry Potter"-inspired "border crossing" analogy (HPBCA) on preservice teachers' (n = 25) Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) content knowledge and disposition toward English language learners (ELLs). The analogy capitalizes on the prior and shared…

This study critically examined the previously reported partial independence between second language (L2) accentedness (degree to which L2 speech differs from the target variety) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding). In prior work, comprehensibility was linked to multiple linguistic dimensions of L2 speech (phonology, fuency, lexis,…

This study partially replicates McManus and Marsden (2017), who found that providing L1 explicit information (EI) plus task-essential practice led L2 learners to make more accurate and faster interpretations of French morphosyntax. The current study removed the original study's L1 EI component to examine the role of the L1 practice. This design…

The present study examines potential age and microparametric effects in childhood bilinguals (currently adults) in an understudied language pairing, Polish-Spanish. Specifically, a Spanish group (N = 28) and a Sequential child bilingual (N = 22) and a Simultaneous bilingual (N = 8) group living in Misiones, Argentina, completed three experimental…

The number of pupils learning modern foreign languages (MFLs) beyond the age of 14 has fallen substantially over the last decade. Among other reasons, shortcomings in teaching methodology have been blamed for this situation. The methodology has been accused of applying the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach in a selective way and not…

Purpose: This study examined the nature of the relation between language-specific vocabulary and conceptual lexical-semantic skills with grammatical abilities within and across languages in preschool Latino dual language learners (DLLs). Method: Sixty-one typically developing, Spanish-English speaking DLLs from preschools serving low-income…

This study explored the impact of metacognitive instruction provided in conjunction with corrective feedback, investigating the moderating effects of two types of implicit corrective feedback (input-providing conversational recasts vs. output-prompting clarification requests) that targeted English third-person singular "-s" and…

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model…

Language instructors are grappling with the question of how to teach writing effectively in upper-level undergraduate world language classes. At that point, students still have to master aspects of grammar; they often work on general writing skills in their native language and hope to improve their skills to effectively bring forth arguments in…

Developmental psychology plays a central role in shaping evidence-based best practices for prelingually deaf children. The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis (Conway et al., 2009) asserts that a lack of auditory stimulation in deaf children leads to impoverished implicit sequence learning abilities, measured via an artificial grammar learning (AGL)…

Background: Individuals with dyslexia demonstrate syntactic difficulties on tasks of language comprehension, yet little is known about spoken language production in this population. Aims: To investigate whether spoken sentence production in college students with dyslexia is less proficient than in typical readers, and to determine whether group…