Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing…

This study compares focus on form in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and mainstream English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts in the production of a specific morphological feature, the English 3rd person singular present tense marker "-s." Research conducted in CLIL contexts to date examining morphosyntactic features…

Background: Text reading prosody has been associated with reading comprehension. However, text reading prosody is a reading-dependent measure that relies heavily on decoding skills. Investigation of the contribution of speech prosody--which is independent from reading skills--in addition to text reading prosody, to reading comprehension could…

This dissertation takes an ethnomethodologically-grounded, conversation-analytic approach in investigating the sequential deployment of linguistic resources in Spanish-language talk-in-interaction. Three sets of resources are examined: 2nd-person singular reference forms (tú, vos, usted), indicative/subjunctive verbal mood selection, and…

This article addresses a child language stage that has figured prominently in the current debate on children's early linguistic competence: the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage, a relatively extended period during which children freely alternate between finite and nonfinite structures in contexts where adults only use finite forms. The study…

This study employed synthetic and meta-analytic techniques to review the literature on the Cognition Hypothesis, which predicts that increasing task complexity influences the quality of second language production. Based on 8 inclusion criteria, 17 published studies were synthesized according to key features. A subset of these studies (k = 9) was…

In the light of the literature describing oral language difficulties in developmental dyslexia (DD), event-related potentials were used in order to compare morphosyntactic processing in 16 adults with DD (aged 20-28 years) and unimpaired controls. Sentences including subject-verb agreement violations were presented auditorily, with grammaticality…

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions ("Nicolas es feliz" versus "'Feliz' es Nicolas," "Es Nicolas 'feliz,'" "Es 'feliz' Nicolas," "Nicolas is 'happy'") in the Spanish of first- and second-generation…

Since the 1980s' decoupling of the formal study of second language acquisition from pedagogical concerns, the social relevance of such research has been of little concern. Early studies, in the 1970s, of uninstructed adult learners' acquisition of morphosyntax pointed to social implications: these working class immigrants had varying levels of…

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14…

Purpose: This study investigated the clinical effectiveness of monolingual versus bilingual language intervention, the latter involving speech-language pathologist-parent collaboration. The study focuses on methods that are currently being recommended and that are feasible within current clinical contexts. Method: Bilingual children with primary…

The objective of this study was to explore dimensions of oral language and reading and their influence on reading comprehension in a relatively understudied population--adolescent readers in 4th through 10th grades. The current study employed latent variable modeling of decoding fluency, vocabulary, syntax, and reading comprehension so as to…

Conceptual replication within a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment provides an understanding of the generalizability of second language acquisition (SLA) research (Porte, 2013; Smith & Schulze, 2013). The present study replicates Collentine (1998a), a classroom-based experiment framed within a larger discussion on the…

The purpose of this research was to evaluate a prototype of an automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based language learning system that provides feedback on different aspects of speaking performance (pronunciation, morphology and syntax) to students of Dutch as a second language. We carried out usability reviews, expert reviews and user tests to…

This study investigated the performance of school age Greek-speaking children with SLI on verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and Subject-Verb (S-V) agreement in comparison to chronological age controls and younger typically developing children. VSTM abilities were assessed by means of a non-word repetition task (NRT) and an elicited production task,…