Writing development is understood to be a multidimensional task, heavily constrained by spelling in its early stages. However, most available evidence comes from studies with learners of the inconsistent English orthography, so our understanding of the nature of early writing could be highly biased. We explored writing dimensions in each language…

Students' grasp of the non-mathematical language in a mathematics story problem--such as vocabulary and syntax--may have an important effect on their problem-solving, and this may be particularly true for students with weaker language skills. However, little experimental research has examined which individual language features influence students'…

Many Filipino migrant workers (overseas Filipino workers) in their status as adult learners struggle in learning the local language of their host countries to native-like proficiency level. With the aim of establishing a second language (L2) acquisition pattern that may be useful in designing responsive adult training and welfare programs, this…

We present a proof-of-concept study that sketches the use of compression algorithms to assess Kolmogorov complexity, which is a text-based, quantitative, holistic, and global measure of structural surface redundancy. Kolmogorov complexity has been used to explore cross-linguistic complexity variation in linguistic typology research, but we are the…

This study explores how Arab L2 learners of English acquire mass nouns. The mass/count distinction is a morphosyntactically encoded grammatical distinction. Arabic and English have different morphosyntactic realisations of mass nouns. English mass nouns take the form of bare singular whereas Arabic mass nouns can take the definite singular form or…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder are likely to experience difficulties with morphosyntax, especially regular past tense marking. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of intervention to improve morphosyntax in young school-aged children with DLD. This study investigated the efficacy of combined explicit and implicit…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

To what extent can second language (L2) speakers acquire a syntactic representation for an L2 structure absent in the first language (L1)? Findings from L2 structural priming studies are in conflict inasmuch as evidence for and against continuity between L1 and L2 sentence production has been shown. Furthermore, previous investigations have not…

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the comprehension problems of children who have a specific reading comprehension deficit (SCD), which is characterized by poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding. The meta-analysis included 86 studies of children with SCD who were assessed in reading comprehension and oral language…

Purpose: This study investigated prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in children with cochlear implants (CIs) and normal hearing (NH) and tested the absolute boundary hypothesis and the relative boundary hypothesis. Processing speed was also investigated. Method: Fifteen children with NH and 13 children with…

Abstract as a summary of a dissertation harbours important information where it serves to attract readers to consider reading the entire passage or to abandon it. This study seeks to investigate the "backward translation" of abstracts made by 10 randomly selected postgraduate students. This research serves as a guideline for students in…

Writing is an ever-creative artifice, elaborated in many different ways and used for many different purposes in different situations throughout history. From this perspective, each writer, embedded within a perceived sociohistoric moment, poses problems to solve, makes choices, and creates solutions from locally available resources and practices…

Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers' (n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames…

Cloze procedure is a technique generally used to assess learners' reading comprehension by deleting words based on a criterion. Learners are then asked to supply the omitted words to complete the sentences as they read the text, guessing the words that may be inserted based on the context. Cloze procedure can also be used to assess, recycle, and…

The paper examines the preverbal markers in Mengrelian as the possible loci of post-syntactic phonological rules that affect the allomorphy of these preverbs. The goal of the paper is to pinpoint the series of these rules and the extent to which the final form of the derived material changes as a result of their application. The phonological rules…