In this study we examined the effects of syntactic and lexical complexity on third-grade students' comprehension of science texts. A total of 16 expository texts were designed to represent systematic differences in levels of syntactic and lexical complexity across four science-related topics ("Tree Frogs, Soil, Jelly Beans and…

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax-semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

The cognitive attributes of Grade 1 students who responded adequately and inadequately to a Tier 2 reading intervention were evaluated. The groups included inadequate responders based on decoding and fluency criteria (n = 29), only fluency criteria (n = 75), adequate responders (n = 85), and typically achieving students (n = 69). The cognitive…

This study investigated the effect of dynamic assessment on learners' syntactic knowledge. The main concern of this study was significant difference between dynamic and static assessment and the possible role of these two forms of assessment on the syntactic development of Iranian EFL college preparatory learners. To fulfill the purpose of the…

This is an experimental study on the relative effects of Van Patten's Processing Instruction (PI) (1996, 2002), a "psycholinguistically-motivated" intervention in teaching second-language (L2) grammar, on young-adult Filipino learners of English. A growing body of research on this methodological alternative, which establishes…

Clinical Question: Would Spanish-speaking ELL students who struggle to learn to write (P) benefit more from a writing intervention that addresses cognitive (executive function) and social well-being (motivation, peer inclusion) (I), or writing intervention strategies that address written language text macrostructure or microstructure only (C), as…

In this paper I will show the preliminary findings from my study of the discourse in synchronous written chats performed by students who study modern German literature within their first term of German studies. The focus of the study is on learning strategies and discourse strategies and how the Swedish learners make use of them when chatting with…

A basic challenge for research into the neurobiology of language is understanding how the brain combines words to make complex representations. Linguistic theory divides this task into several computations including syntactic structure building and semantic composition. The close relationship between these computations, however, poses a strong…

This dissertation investigates the syntax-prosody interface in Standard Arabic, focusing on the ambiguity of a modifier (relative clause or adjective phrase) in relation to the two nouns in a complex noun phrase. Ambiguity resolution tendencies for this construction differ across languages, contrary to otherwise universal parsing tendencies. One…

Three experiments explored how pictures in award-winning children's storybooks contribute to their cohesion. In Experiment 1, one group of college students read storybooks with pictures, and another group read them with the pictures removed. Both groups answered questions inserted periodically. The source for about one half of the questions was…

This study examines the potential native language (L1) attrition of the ongoing value of the Spanish present tense among long-term Spanish immigrants. Based on the assumption of second-language (L2) transfer and proposals on the permeability of interface-conditioned structures, it is hypothesized that long-term Spanish immigrants will show…

This study piloted test items that will be used in a computer-delivered and scored test of productive grammatical ability in English as a second language (ESL). Findings from research on learners' development of morphosyntactic, syntactic, and functional knowledge were synthesized to create a framework of grammatical features. We outline the…

Although anecdotally there appear to be differences in the way native speakers use and comprehend their native language, most empirical investigations of language processing study university students and none have studied differences in language proficiency, which may be independent of resource limitations such as working memory span. We examined…

This study examined the existence of an object omission stage and the interaction between object omissions and substitution errors in the early stages of the development of Spanish syntax. One hundred and three Spanish-speaking children from Colombia completed an elicitation task evaluating the production of direct object pronouns. Results…