Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically, researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively…

Understanding why mistakes are made in a class of ESL students not only helps teachers emend the mistakes, but also enables them to better explain to the author how to correct mistakes in future writing. When a teacher shows some understanding of a writer's native language, it makes the writer feel more comfortable with, and less alienated from,…

This paper focuses on the predictive influence of phonological awareness, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling. The retrospective study correlated spelling performance in a group of 199 French-speaking children at the end of grade 2 with earlier capacities for phonemic manipulation, morphological/syntactic correction, and…

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly…

It is widely attested that university students face considerable difficulties with reasoning in analysis, especially when dealing with statements involving two different quantifiers. We focus in this paper on a specific mistake which appears in proofs where one applies twice or more a statement of the kind "for all X, there exists Y such that R(X,…

It is a matter of debate whether the two differentiated grammatical systems in a bilingual child develop autonomously, or whether there is interdependence and in what areas (Genesee, 2001; Meisel, 2001). Extensive research is being carried out in the emergence of the two grammars, but not much attention has been given to the development of…

We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher…

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime…

This study was designed to explore a model of communicative competence (Abbeduto & Nuccio, 1989) and identify whether its components could (a) predict pragmatic language difficulties for children with emotional or behavioral disorders (E/BD) and (b) describe the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic language ability as well as the social skills of…

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…

This study addresses bidialectism by investigating the linguistic situation on the bidialectal island of Cyprus where Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and the regional Cypriot dialect (CD) are both routinely used. The study implemented a language programme that embraced both sociolinguistic and educational factors and was designed to teach SMG by using…

One of the great puzzles of language acquisition has been described as poverty of the stimulus: how are complex aspects of language acquired when they appear to be rare or even non-occurring in the input that a learner receives and comprehends? This article presents an emergentist solution to one aspect of this puzzle (involving relative clauses)…

The study reported in this article is a part of a large-scale study investigating syntactic complexity in second language (L2) oral data in commonly taught foreign languages (English, German, Japanese, and Spanish; Ortega, Iwashita, Rabie, & Norris, in preparation). In this article, preliminary findings of the analysis of the Japanese data are…

This article reports on the results of two international systematic research reviews which focus on different aspects of teaching grammar to improve the quality and accuracy of 5-16-year-olds' writing in English. The results show that there is little evidence to indicate that the teaching of formal grammar is effective; and that teaching…

This article examines the question: Do lexical, syntactic, fluency, and discourse measures of oral language collected under narrative conditions predict reading achievement both within and across languages for bilingual children? More than 1,500 Spanish-English bilingual children attending kindergarten-third grade participated. Oral narratives…