In recent years, an increasing number of university students in Canada speak a home language other than English, which can put added pressure on the kinds of linguistic, cultural, and academic support they may require in their tertiary education and in the workplace. Indeed, communication difficulties can surface in the workplace for students…

This case study reports on the progress of Navon, a 13-year-old boy with prelingual deafness, over a 3-month period following exposure to Logo, a computer programming language that visualizes specific programming commands by means of a virtual drawing tool called the Turtle. Despite an almost complete lack of skills in spoken and sign language,…

This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children. A vocabulary intervention in science was developed using previous research on effective vocabulary and science instruction. Participants were 39 English-learning, bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking…

"Curiosity Corner" is an early childhood curriculum emphasizing children's language and literacy skills. It comprises two sets of 38 weekly thematic units--one for three-year-olds and one for four-year-olds. Program staff conduct daily lessons using sequential daily activities. One study of "Curiosity Corner" meets the What…

The idea that the person doing the talking is the person doing the learning seems counter-intuitive. Yet, that is exactly the case. When students put their thoughts into words, they internalize the learning. As they dialogue with peers, articulate their ideas, and express themselves, their oral language skills translate directly into written…

The study investigated the ability of 10-month-old infants, from monolingual English speaking environments, to categorize comforting and approving infant-directed speech (IDS) utterances across languages. Infants participated in an infant-controlled habituation procedure, in which they heard up to 12 different exemplars, in 12 different languages,…

Measures of language sample length (in c-units) and morphological, syntactic, and narrative abilities were obtained from oral narrative transcripts of 22 children who stutter and 22 children who do not stutter; participants attended kindergarten, first, and second grades. A two-way MANOVA yielded significant main effects for grade, with…

The effects of dialectal differences upon the speech production skills of children with phonological disorders are poorly understood. One might predict that the phonological profile of children using a radical dialect (e.g., Puerto Rican Spanish, which alters consonants in the syllable rhyme) will differ from that of children who use a…

This study took a pragmatic approach to examining the effects of task difficulty on L2 oral output. Twenty native English speakers and 59 Japanese students of English at two different proficiency levels produced speech acts of requests and refusals in a role play task. The task had two situation types based on three social variables:…

Mercer, N. (1995) coined the term interthinking to link the cognitive and social functions of group talk. Essentially, interthinking means using talk to think collectively, to engage with others' ideas through oral language. In this article I share four excerpts from small group interactive read-aloud sessions that were conducted with Grade 1…

This study analyzes the use of role-play as an elicitation device for the evaluation of a nonnative speaker's oral language. In this analysis of role-play as a methodology to generate data for assessment purposes, the study examines the role that interlocutors play in two types of interactions. It raises questions about the validity and…

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was…

Background and Aims: The current study is a first investigation reporting the speech production characteristics of an early deafened adult cochlear implant user after a course of speech-language treatment. Methods and Procedures: The participant is culturally deaf and received the cochlear implant when she was 43 years old. A 24-week ABCABC…

For several decades the intellectual abilities of deaf children and adolescents, as measured by performance IQ, have been reported as comparable with those of hearing children and adolescents. Differences have been reported, however, on measures of verbal IQ, with deaf children and adolescents typically obtaining verbal IQ scores within the low…

The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. "no sleep", "not see", "can't reach") from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3-3;4 (MLU 2.05-3.1) and his mother. The…