This paper argues that analyzing the patterns of individual subject performance in tests of comprehension of passives might give insight into how little children interpret passives: 3 and 4 year-olds seem to go through a range of passive interpretation, that varies from actual comprehension to total non-comprehension. The fact that some small…

Users of the Probability Approach choose the right one from four basic types of conditional sentences--factual, predictive, hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals, by judging how likely (i.e. the probability) the event in the result-clause will take place when the condition in the if-clause is met. Thirty-three students from the experimental…

The central question of the present study was whether there are differences between children with Asperger Syndrome (AS), children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and healthy controls (HC) with respect to the organization of narratives and their verbalization of internal states. Oral narrations of a wordless picture book…

This article presents the results of an action research study whose purpose was to apply alternatives for the development of grammatical competence in a group of third semester students of a Morphosyntax I course in an English language teaching undergraduate program at a Colombian public university. Given the fact that the teaching of grammar has…

The DAPPLE (Dynamic Assessment of Preschoolers' Proficiency in Learning English) is currently being developed in response to a clinical need. Children exposed to English as an additional language may be referred to speech and language therapy because their proficiency in English is not the same as their monolingual peers. Some, but not all, of…

A key concern for writers is the creation of cohesion in a text, and writers are told by style manuals to avoid the use of demonstratives ("this," "that," "these," "those") as pronouns in order to maintain cohesion. However, previous corpus-based investigations have already revealed that authors of academic texts use demonstratives as both…

This article reports a small-scale study that investigated the effect of (1) an instructional method, viz. directing learners' attention to formulaic sequences (FS) in a text, and (2) typographic salience, i.e. bold typeface and underlined, on foreign-language (FL) learners' recall of FS and single words (SW). Twenty-eight FL learners read a…

The current paper attempts to account for the formation of English middle sentences. Discussing a set of previous analyses on the construction under investigation we show, following the assumptions of Oosten(1986) and Iwata(1999), that English middle constructions should be divided into two types: generic middle constructions and non-generic…

The relevance of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses to the "real world" of college writing is an ongoing issue for those who teach ESL. Ideally, ESL composition classes should help students make connections between what they learn about writing and the ways they might need to write later on in their academic careers. Unfortunately, as with…

Many students who are nonnative speakers of English, yet highly proficient, are placed into basic writing or English as a Second Language courses when they enter college. While these students may have advanced oral English proficiency, their writing frequently suffers from a lack of training in academic writing and commonly contains fragments and…

Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs…

There is an increasing sensitivity to the challenges posed by the language of examination papers and of instruction in scientific subjects, especially for non-native speakers of English. It has been observed that in addition to technical subject-specific vocabulary, non-technical words such as instructional verbs have been sources of difficulty,…

The scope of linguistic planning, or the amount of linguistic information that speakers can prepare in advance for an utterance they are about to produce, is highly variable. Distinguishing between possible sources of this variability provides a way to discriminate between accounts of language production that assume structurally incremental and…

We examined priming of adjective-noun structures in Dutch hearing and deaf children. In three experiments, hearing 7- and 8-year-olds, hearing 11- and 12-year-olds, and deaf 11- and 12-year-olds read a prenominal structure (e.g., "the blue ball"), a relative clause structure (e.g., "the ball that is blue"), or a main clause…

Semantically reversible sentences are prone to misinterpretation and take longer for typically developing children and adults to comprehend; they are also particularly problematic for those with language difficulties such as aphasia or Specific Language Impairment. In our study, we used fMRI to compare the processing of semantically reversible and…