A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

Preschool teachers' language use has been described in recent research, as preschoolers' language development is found to be an important preparation for later reading development. Based on existing research on teachers' language use in sociodramatic play, however, it is still unclear how teachers use their language specifically in sociodramatic…

Despite considerable evidence suggesting that second language (L2) learners experience difficulties when processing morphosyntactic aspects of L2 in online tasks, the mechanisms underlying these difficulties remain unknown. The aim of this dissertation is to explore possible causes for the difficulties by comparing attentional mechanisms engaged…

This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of high frequency noun keywords in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Research has shown that one of the areas of difficulty in science discourse concerns lexis, especially that of collocations. This paper describes a corpus-based…

This study examined the acquisition of the BA construction by English-speaking learners of Chinese. The BA construction is a unique yet important grammar phenomenon in Chinese. Whether second language (L2) learners of Chinese are able to understand and use this construction correctly and appropriately may affect the overall success of their…

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how complexity, accuracy and fluency interact in early L2 development, when learners' linguistic means are underdeveloped. Learners then resort to rote-learned formulaic sequences to complement their current grammar when it is unable to meet their communicative needs. The interplay between their…

The primary concern of this thesis is how we can achieve rigorous testability when we set the properties of the Computational System (hypothesized to be at the center of the language faculty) as our object of inquiry and informant judgments as a tool to construct and/or evaluate our hypotheses concerning the properties of the Computational System.…

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an…

Children born preterm are at risk for deficits in language and reading. They are also at risk for injury to the white matter of the brain. The goal of this study was to determine whether performance in language and reading skills would be associated with white matter properties in children born preterm and full-term. Children born before 36 weeks…

This article presents 34 characteristics of texts and tasks ("text features") that can make continuous (prose), noncontinuous (document), and quantitative texts easier or more difficult for adolescents and adults to comprehend and use. The text features were identified by examining the assessment tasks and associated texts in the national…

This study investigated the development of second language online auditory processing with ab initio German learners of Dutch. We assessed the influence of different levels of background noise and different levels of semantic and syntactic target word predictability on word-monitoring latencies. There was evidence of syntactic, but not…

Purpose: The present study examines the impact of typical aging and Parkinson's disease (PD) on the relationship among breath pausing, syntax, and punctuation. Method: Thirty young adults, 25 typically aging older adults, and 15 individuals with PD participated. Fifteen participants were age- and sex-matched to the individuals with PD.…

This study compares two approaches to grammatical knowledge in language assessment: the structural view that regards grammatical knowledge as vocabulary and syntax (Bachman 1990), and the communicative view that perceives it as the binary combination of grammatical form and meaning (Purpura 2004). 1,491 second-year nursing students from eight…

Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual…

This article reports on the development and preliminary implementation trials of a modular small-group intervention targeting syntax and vocabulary for children at high risk for reading comprehension difficulties in grades prekindergarten through first. The intervention, delivered by trained paraprofessionals, included 12 weeks of 20-minute…