The purpose of this study was to examine ethnic and gender differences in using DISCOVER, a performance-based assessment, for identifying gifted students. The sample consisted of 941 students from grades K-5 belonging to six ethnicities: White Americans, African-Americans, Hispanics, Native-Americans, South Pacific/Pacific Islanders, and Arabs.…

This study aims to highlight aspects of difficulty encountered by Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners and to explore the factors underlying these aspects. Data were gathered through a Chinese Language Learning Difficulty Survey from 164 CFL learners, mostly in British higher education. The survey data provided useful exploratory findings.…

Many adolescent and adult L2 learners in language classrooms, both in the US and other countries, have little or no alphabetic print literacy. Language teachers may turn to SLA research for assistance, yet almost all research on oral SLA has focused on educated, highly-literate learners (Bigelow & Tarone 2004; Tarone, Bigelow & Hansen 2009). The…

Why are students silent? Using written reflections and interviews, Mary M. Reda examines students' perceptions of speaking and being silent in a first-year composition classroom, and explores how their teachers, classroom relationships, and their own sense of identity shape their decisions to speak or be silent. By challenging many firmly held…

This paper is intended for early childhood caregivers--teachers in centers and those caring for children in homes. It is intended to help caregivers learn more about how children develop the ability to "use words" to communicate their thoughts and needs and ask questions, and to "understand language they hear" in conversations and in books. Why is…

Spoken language processing in noisy environments, a hallmark of the human brain, is subject to age-related decline, even when peripheral hearing might be intact. The present study examines the cortical cerebral hemodynamics (measured by fMRI) associated with such processing in the aging brain. Younger and older subjects identified single words in…

The Atse Kituwah Academy (New Kituwah Academy) houses the new Cherokee immersion school in Cherokee, North Carolina. Cherokee is located on the Qualla Boundary in the mountains of the western part of the state, the contemporary homeland of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI). In 2005, a comprehensive study of the health of the Cherokee…

Word finding difficulties are often reported by epileptic patients with seizures originating from the language dominant cerebral hemisphere, for example, in temporal lobe epilepsy. Evidence regarding the brain regions underlying this deficit comes from studies of peri-operative electro-cortical stimulation, as well as post-surgical performance.…

The authors identify 2 major types of statistical data from which semantic representations can be learned. These are denoted as "experiential data" and "distributional data". Experiential data are derived by way of experience with the physical world and comprise the sensory-motor data obtained through sense receptors. Distributional data, by…

Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has…

A picture-word interference paradigm with visually presented distractors was used to investigate the independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on Mandarin monosyllabic word production. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship along different lexical dimensions were varied. We observed a…

The use of pair work in speaking assessment may encourage collaboration in the classroom and has other advantages (Saville & Hargreaves, 1999; Taylor, 2000) but from a measurement perspective, the paired oral format may be problematic because a partner may unfairly influence an examinee's performance or otherwise bias scores. In this study,…

The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of manipulating the cognitive complexity of three different types of oral tasks on interaction. The study first considers the concepts of task complexity and interaction and then examines the specific studies that have looked at the effects of increasing task complexity on conversational…

This study investigates to what degree, and in what manner, the L1 and L2(s) influence spoken French L3. The analysis is divided in two parts. The first examines the cross-linguistic lexemes of 30 Swedish learners, divided into three groups according to previous exposure to French. The results show that proficiency in the L3 is crucial: the least…

The analysis of circumstance adverbials in this paper was based on L1 and L2 corpora of student presentations, each of which consisting of approximately 30,000 words. The overall goal of the investigation was to identify specific functions L1 and L2 college students attributed to circumstance adverbials (the most frequently used adverbial class in…