Currently influential models of writing processes, such as Flower and Hayes (1980) and Hayes (1996) do not attend explicitly to metalinguistics--writers' ability to monitor and control linguistic skills. Dimensions of metalinguistic ability--metaphonology, metasyntax, metasemantics, metapragmatics, and metatext--arguably are central to the writing…

As a growing number of testing programs use integrated writing tasks, more validation research is needed to inform stakeholders about score use and interpretation. The current study investigates the relationship between writing proficiency and discourse features in an integrated reading-writing task. At a Middle Eastern university, 136…

The case-study aims to examine the effectiveness of training of morphological structure on the spelling of compounds by a spelling-disabled primary school student. The experimental design of the intervention was based on the word-pair paradigm and included a pre-test, a training program and a post-test (n = 50 pairs). The Training Program aimed to…

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template;…

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among…

Corpus of High School Academic Texts (COHAT), currently of 150,000+ words, aims to make academic language instruction a more data-driven and student-centered discovery learning as a special type of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), emphasizing students' critical thinking and metacognition. Since 2013, high school English as an additional…

This study considers the upper limit of ultimate attainment in the L2 French and L3 English of trilingual learners. The learners are native speakers of Moroccan Arabic who started learning L2 French at eight and L3 English at 16. They are advanced in both languages. Four constructions representing the verb movement and null subject parameter were…

Across the Germanic language family, we find a type of movement traditionally termed "topicalization," which may be realized in Germanic languages which possess the so-called Verb-Second (V2) constraint, as well as those without it. I will henceforward call this phenomenon "fronting" to avoid theoretical assumptions. This…

This dissertation contains three studies that investigate whether attested patterns of constituent order distribution and change in the world's languages can be attributed, in part, to cognitive preferences for some constituent orders over others. To assess these preferences, seven experiments employed an "elicited pantomime" task.…

As is well known, the Insular Celtic languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton and the now-extinct Manx and Cornish) utilize a class of verbal abstracts known as "verbal nouns" to perform the functions that are fulfilled in other Indo-European languages by infinitives and supines. Yet in many ways the Celtic verbal noun remains somewhat of an…

When people describe motion events, their path expressions are biased toward inclusion of goal paths (e.g., into the house) and omission of source paths (e.g., out of the house). In this paper, we explored whether this asymmetry has its origins in people's non-linguistic representations of events. In three experiments, 4-year-old children and…

Recently researchers have suggested that syntactic priming may facilitate the production of "wh"-questions with obligatory auxiliary verbs, particularly when learners are prompted to produce those questions with a wide variety of lexical items (McDonough & Kim, 2009; McDonough & Mackey, 2008). However, learners' ability to benefit from syntactic…

Prosody plays a variety of roles in infants' communicative development, aiding in attention modulation, speech segmentation, and syntax acquisition. This study investigates the extent to which parents also spontaneously modulate prosodic aspects of infant directed speech in ways that distinguish semantic aspects of language. Fourteen mothers of…

Although many children are referred with difficulties in both their speech and their language, the literature offers relatively little guidance on their therapy. Should clinicians treat these difficulties independently? Or should treatment depend on the potential impact of one domain on the other? This study aimed to investigate the relationship…

This article makes use of Perfetti's Lexical Quality Hypothesis as a perspective for thinking about vocabulary instruction in terms of semantics (meaning), phonology (pronunciation), orthography (spelling), morphology (meaningful word parts), and syntax (how words function in sentences). Examples are presented of how these aspects of vocabulary…