This study examines the transfer of first language (L1) and second language (L2) pragmatic expression--realized in the request speech act--in oral and written modalities by Spanish-speaking third language (L3) Portuguese learners (bilingual Spanish heritage speakers, native English speakers who are proficient in L2 Spanish, and native Spanish…

Four experiments in written and spoken dialogue tested the predictions of two distinct accounts of syntactic encoding in sentence production: a lexicalist, residual activation account and an implicit-learning account. Experiments 1 and 2 showed syntactic priming (i.e., the tendency to reuse the syntactic structure of a prime sentence in the…

The acquisition of reading vocabulary is one of the major challenges for deaf children in bilingual education programs. Deaf children have to acquire a written lexicon that can effectively be used in reading. In this paper, we present a developmental model that describes reading vocabulary acquisition of deaf children in bilingual education…

This study investigated the phonological skills of university students who were unexpectedly poor spellers relative to their word reading accuracy. Compared with good spellers, unexpectedly poor spellers showed no deficits in phonological memory, selection of appropriate graphemes for phonemes in word misspellings and nonword spellings, and…

In this study the print awareness of 25 unschooled adult illiterates in the Netherlands was compared with that of 24 pre-reading children and of 23 low-educated literate adults with approximately four years of primary schooling. The illiterates were interviewed about their experiences with writing and all participants completed six assessments of…

New writing systems for several of China's minority languages were developed and implemented during a unique period in Chinese history. Throughout the different stages of modern Chinese history, these writing systems have had various societal functions and uses, including the improvement of education and literacy for China's ethnic minorities. In…

Frequency trajectory is a better measure to investigate age-limited learning effects than age of acquisition (AoA) ratings (Zevin, J. D., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2002). "Age of acquisition effects in word reading and other tasks." "Journal of Memory and Language, 47"(1), 1-29). The current study uses frequency trajectory as a variable to investigate…

Language plays a very important role in understanding the culture and mindset of people. Given the abundance of electronic multilingual data, it is interesting to see what insight can be gained by automatic analysis of text. This in turn calls for text analysis which is focused on non-topical information such as emotions being expressed that is in…

This study involved an evaluation of the subjective perspectives held by a panel of 16 homeland security subject matter experts to determine what the needs of the homeland security professional community are for educational programs. The researcher examined the knowledge, skills, and abilities deemed important in homeland security to determine…

This case study focuses on the feedback that is provided by tutors to learners in the course of synchronous online teaching. More specifically, we study how trainee tutors used the affordances of Visu, an experimental web videoconferencing system, to provide negative feedback. Visu features classical functionalities such as video and chat, and it…

The purpose of this interpretivist qualitative study is to discover what factors influence first-year college students as they construct their text messages. Using grounded theory methodology, 11 first-year college students at a university in the Southeast were interviewed one-on-one and through text messaging in order to gain insight into…

This study examined the effects of the "READ 180"[R] program on the reading achievement levels of fourth grade students who participated in the "READ 180"[R] program (Scholastic Incorporated, 2005) compared to fourth grade students who were reading below grade level but who were not participating in the "READ 180"[R]…

This research investigates whether English speakers who learn Mandarin Chinese via a familiar orthography differ from those who learn via a non-familiar orthography in their perception of English-Mandarin sound pairs. Canadian English speakers (n = 32) participated in a series of experimental tasks. The tasks included pre- and posttest perception…

Individual differences in abilities to form, access, and hone phonological representations of words are implicated in the development of oral and written language. This study addressed three important gaps in the literature concerning measurement of individual differences in phonological representation. First, we empirically examined the…

The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of appropriately designed multimedia software for both conversational and formal styles with respect to various variables. The model of nonequivalent control group was used in the study. While the group studying with the multimedia material in formal style included 22 students, the other group…