This dissertation probes children's metalinguistic awareness of syntactic ambiguity (as in the sentence "The man is poking the monkey with a banana," where the PP "with a banana" can be understood in two ways, associated with either the monkey or the poking). Several studies suggest that children do not spontaneously detect…

This book comprises 20 chapters that have been divided into two distinct parts: language in educational contexts and language in cultural contexts. The contributions included in this book are the outcome of the conference Contacts and Contrasts that was held in Konin, Poland, in 2021 (C&C2021). The contributions featured in the first part of…

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…

Purpose: This study examined African American English--speaking children's use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries. Method: The data were based on language samples obtained from 48 three-year-olds. Analyses examined rates of marking by auxiliary type, auxiliary surface form, succeeding element, and syntactic construction and by a number of child…

Purpose: The aims of the study were to explore responses of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to rich vocabulary instruction and to identify potential factors that contribute to outcomes. Method: Children with DLD participated in a language intervention embedded within a science camp. Using parent and clinician reports,…

Introduction: Many ESL college students have reading comprehension problems in English, such as difficulty understanding ideas explicitly or implicitly stated in a text, making inferences, and inferring meanings of difficult words from context. Aims: The article proposes the integration of inspirational quotes in the teaching of English to EFL…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language. Design/methodology/approach: In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing…