This study examined whether syntactic awareness was related to reading comprehension difficulties in either first language (L1) Chinese or second language (L2) English, or both, among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Parallel L1 and L2 metalinguistic and reading measures, including syntactic word-order, morphological awareness,…

Complex noun phrases (CNP) are a major vehicle of academic written discourse (Halliday, 1988/2004). However, despite the view that they pose significant challenges to English language learners, they are rarely taught in college-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs, especially for the purposes of improving reading comprehension. This…

Purpose: This study examined the relationship between utterance length, syntactic complexity, and the probability of making an error at the utterance level. Method: The participants in this study included 830 Spanish-speaking first graders who were learning English at school. Story retells in both Spanish and English were collected from all…

Background: Given the integral role that verbs play in sentence production, understanding verb deficits is critical to clinical practice. Difficulties in sentence production are often directly related to an inability to retrieve argument structure information which, according to most theoretical accounts, is specified at a lexical level as part of…

Over the past decades, subjects concerned with the Chinese character "zhi [Chinese character omitted]", i.e. grammatical structure, in ancient Chinese language, have been widely explored. This paper conducts a research from a new dimension: the Cardiff Grammar, an integral part of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which is famous for…

This article describes the lexical and syntactic development of written narratives in 24 deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students aged between 8 and 18 and takes into account how their varying linguistic backgrounds may predict their written performance. All participants use spoken Swedish, but the study also considers their proficiency in Swedish…

This study aimed to examine the unique and joint contributions of behavioral and emotional self-regulation to key but understudied emergent literacy and early social skills, disentangling sex-differentiated paths. The participants were 231 Portuguese preschoolers (50% boys; M[subscript age] = 59.5 months; SD = 8.5) enrolled in 47 classrooms. In…

We investigated how native and fluent users of English segment continuous speech and to what extent they use sound-related and structure-related cues. As suggested by the notion of multi-competence, L1 users are not seen as ideal models with perfect command of English, and L2 users not as lacking in competence. We wanted to see how language…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

First-year composition courses must balance a range of writing instruction priorities including genre and audience awareness with language instruction, particularly for second-language writers. Despite the attested efficacy of "dynamic" written corrective feedback for language gains in intensive English programs, little research has…

Problem posing is a learning approach that trains students to be able to process and communicate mathematical problems based on information obtained. This study aims to describe the ability of high school students to pose problems on the topic of the system of linear equations in two variables (SLETV). This study used a quantitative descriptive…

Sustained attention (SA) and short-term memory (STM) contribute to language function in Down syndrome (DS). We proposed models in which relations of SA to language in DS are mediated by STM. Thirty-seven youth with DS aged 10-22 years (M = 15.59) completed SA, STM, and language tasks. Cross-sectional mediation analyses were run with the…

Structured Query Language (SQL) is still the de facto database query language widely used in industry and taught in almost all university level database courses. The role of SQL is further strengthened by the emergence of NewSQL systems which use SQL as their query language as well as some NoSQL systems, e.g., Cassandra and DynamoDB, which base…

Irony comprehension can be a kind of challenge to those who are relatively less skillful in reading. To examine how DHH college students (DCSs) were different from hearing college students (HCSs) in the reading of ironic discourses, we conducted two experiments in the self-paced reading task. In Experiment 1, the statement was either literally…

Linguistically and cognitively speaking, functional (extended) projections are more abstract and structurally more complicated than lexical projections. Acquiring functional projections could be problematic for second language learners and thus a crucial issue to be considered by language instructors and curriculum developers. The present study…