The relationship between grammatical and lexical development was compared in 233 English and 233 Italian children aged between 1;6 and 2;6, matched for age, gender, and vocabulary size on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Four different measures of Mean Length of Utterance were applied to the three longest utterances…

The present experiments investigate how young language learners begin to acquire form-based categories and the relationships between them. We investigated this question by exposing 12-month-olds to auditory structure of the form aX and bY (infants had to learn that a-elements grouped with Xs and not Ys). Infants were then tested on strings from…

The present study was designed to examine the processes by which grammatical gender is assigned during word production. French words varied in strength of sublexical cues, based on whether the word ending was typical for one gender rather than neutral about gender, and lexical cues, derived from the associated definite article being uninformative…

This paper describes the linguistic forms used to perform the speech act of suggestions in both real language and ESL textbooks. Comparisons between suggestions in two authentic settings in a corpus, professor-student interaction during office hours and student-student study groups, and six popular ESL textbooks, three old and three recent, were…

"Education Matters" is the monthly newsletter of the Association of American Educators (AAE), an organization dedicated to advancing the American teaching profession through personal growth, professional development, teacher advocacy and protection. This issue of the newsletter includes: (1) A Few Good Men: The Success of the Male…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Functional Communication Training (FCT) and a Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA) on the challenging behavior and language development of a 4-year-old girl with autism spectrum disorder. The participant's mother implemented modified functional analysis (FA) and intervention procedures in…

Differential performance results occur when a specific population subgroup achieves a passing rate which is significantly lower than that of the normative reference group. African Americans do less well, in general, on all types of assessments, including constructed-response tests. The present study examined the writing styles of African American…

Recent "Focus on Form" studies have emphasized the importance of learner--rather than teacher--generated attention to formal aspects of interlanguage. In this study, we took advantage of EFL learners' analytical grammar knowledge and designed a post-task approach to foster learners' self-initiated attention. Student dyads transcribed their…

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken…

Hierarchical models of agrammatism propose that sentence production deficits can be accounted for in terms of clausal syntactic structure [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). "Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree." "Brain and Language, 56", 397-425; Hagiwara, H. (1995). "The breakdown of functional…

This article describes the development and validation of a diagnostic test of German and its integration in a programme of formative assessment during a one-year initial teacher-training course. The test focuses on linguistic aspects that cause difficulty for trainee teachers of German as a foreign language and assesses implicit and explicit…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: it primarily intended to incorporate some insights into the newly-explored field of L3A: secondly, it aimed to highlight the significance of translation as a valid language activity in exploring the native language influence on non-native language acquisition process. To this end, it investigated the…

Six experiments explored how native and non-native Spanish speakers process article-noun sequences in real time, using eye movements as a response measure. Can listeners use gender-marked articles ("la" and "el", the feminine and masculine forms of "the") to rapidly identify familiar and novel nouns? In Experiment 1, adults who learned Spanish as…

The process of acquisition of three syntactic structures in Engish (i.e., yes-no questions, wh-questions, and negation) was studied. The subjects were 30 school children whose native language as well as medium of instruction was Malayalam, one of the four dominant Dravidian languages. The children were in the second, fourth, and sixth year of…

THIS COLLECTION OF 36 ESSAYS BY SOME OF THE MOST OUTSTANDING LINGUISTS NOW WORKING IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE BRITISH ISLES PRESENTS A COMPOSITE PICTURE OF THE VARIOUS ASPECTS OF MODERN LINGUISTICS. DESIGNED FOR A READING AUDIENCE OF FRESHMEN OR UPPER-DIVISION ENGLISH STUDENTS, FUTURE TEACHERS, OR THE LAYMAN INTERESTED IN LANGUAGE AND ITS…