Background: Recent studies have indicated that many children with autism spectrum disorders present with language difficulties that are similar to those of children with specific language impairments, leading some to argue for similar structural deficits in these two disorders. Aims: Repetition of sentences involving long-distance dependencies was…

This study investigates how aphasic impairment impinges on syntactic and/or semantic recursivity of human language. A series of tests has been conducted with the participation of five Hungarian speaking aphasic subjects and 10 control subjects. Photographs representing simple situations were presented to subjects and questions were asked about…

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that…

Learning to debug is a difficult, yet essential, aspect of learning to program. Students in this multi-institutional study report that finding bugs is harder than fixing them. They use a wide variety of debugging strategies, some of them unexpected. Time spent on understanding the problem can be effective. Pattern matching, particularly at the…

This study contributes to the characterization of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI) by investigating whether deficits in the production and comprehension of pronouns in Greek children with SLI are best accounted for by domain-general or domain-specific models of the language faculty. The Greek pronominal system distinguishes…

Although previous research has shown a processing facilitation for conjoined phrases that share the same structure, it is currently not clear whether this parallelism advantage is specific to particular syntactic environments such as coordination, or whether it is an example of more general effect in sentence comprehension. Here, we report three…

How do children know the sentence "the glass is empty and not empty" is inconsistent? One possibility is that they are sensitive to the formal structure of the sentences and know that a proposition and its negation cannot be jointly true. Alternatively, they could represent the 2 state of affairs referred to and realize that these are…

This volume includes two sections of the 2019 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; and (2) Language and Linguistics. Education and Educational Research includes 11 papers covering scientific topics in the full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy of education, educational…

This dissertation has two inter-related goals: (i) to describe and provide novel analyses of three types of important and difficult phenomena within Amharic DPs and (ii) to explore the properties of the syntax-morphology interface. The core phenomena explicated are the unusual distribution of the definite marker, the gender system (which relies…

This study was conducted to investigate the influence of Colloquial Jordanian Arabic upon the use of negation and the definite article in English. The sample of the study consisted of 100 male and 100 female Jordanian 10th graders in the academic year 2011-2012. The students were randomly selected from public schools in the region of Karak-Jordan.…

Current debates about successful mathematics pedagogy suggest that mathematical learning and problem solving can be enhanced by using metaphors as they provide students with a tool for thinking. But assisting pre-service teachers to understand the importance of careful and accurate explanations for mathematical concepts remains an issue. This…

This review of current writing assessment practices focuses upon the adult population, an area significantly underrepresented within psychoeducational literature. As compared to other populations, such as K-12 students, there are few options for the practitioner wishing to evaluate adult writers by means of standardized assessment instruments.…

The study analyses teenagers' e-mail requests during academic cyber-consultation, exploring how the performance of request modifiers is influenced by participants' perceptions of the degree of imposition of the speech act and social distance with the recipient. A total of 295 e-mail requests, 145 produced by British English speakers (BES) and 150…

Extensive studies have been conducted regarding mother tongue (L1) interference and developing English writing skills. This study, however, aims to investigate the influence of the Spanish language on second language (L2) writing skills at several Ecuadorian senior high schools in Loja. To achieve this, 351 students and 42 teachers from second…

This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124…