Correction and repair as components of an instructional practice that facilitates learning have figured prominently in research on classroom-based second and foreign language learning. Recent studies incorporating a conversation analytic (CA) perspective on second language acquisition (SLA) have also focused on repair and correction. From a CA…

The present study aims at testing the two dominant hypotheses regarding the development of inflections and other functional categories namely the "Structure-Building Model" and the "Continuity Hypothesis" within the generative theory. According to the first view, functional categories are entirely absent in children's early grammars, which contain…

In this interview, Eve Wallwork, a junior at David W. Butler High School in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC) School District, talks about her research project on the field of early language learning. Wallwork shares the most important findings of her research, the benefits of early language learning, and her plans in the future.

It has been proposed that early language is acquired in the context of interpersonal interactions, with parent-child interactions serving as an important foundation (Nicely, Tamis-LeMonda, & Bornstein, 1999; Sachs, 2005; Tamis-LeMonda, Cristofaro, Rodriguez, & Bornstein, 2006). The purpose of this article is to review the literature on maternal…

Good language learner studies show that attending to form is associated with successful learning. This paper reports interviews with three university English majors who had won prizes in nationwide English speaking competitions and debate tournaments in China. The interviewees regarded text memorization and imitation as the most effective methods…

In a series of studies children show increasing mastery of irregular plural forms (such as "mice") simply by producing erroneous over-regularized versions of them (such as "mouses"). We explain this phenomenon in terms of successive approximation in imitation: Children over-regularize early in acquisition because the representations of frequent,…

This study reports on the use of (c)overt subjects and subject-verb agreement in Hebrew in the spontaneous speech of a child, EK, acquiring Hebrew and English simultaneously from birth and of five slightly younger Hebrew monolingual controls. Analysis shows that EK's production of pragmatically inappropriate overt subjects is more than three times…

Purpose: To evaluate the discriminant accuracy of a grammatical measure for the identification of language impairment (LI) in Latino English-speaking children. Specifically, the study examined the diagnostic accuracy of the Test of English Morphosyntax (E-MST; Pena, Gutierrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore (n.d.) to determine (a)…

In this study we present a self-organizing connectionist model of early lexical development. We call this model DevLex-II, based on the earlier DevLex model. DevLex-II can simulate a variety of empirical patterns in children's acquisition of words. These include a clear vocabulary spurt, effects of word frequency and length on age of acquisition,…

The emergence of shared symbol systems is considered to be a pivotal moment in human evolution and human development. These changes are normally explained by reference to changes in people's internal cognitive processes. We present 2 experiments which provide evidence that changes in the external, collaborative processes that people use to…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

Orphanage life places children at risk of developmental delay, particularly with regard to speech and language acquisition. The aim of this study was to evaluate opportunities for children in an orphanage in South Africa to acquire communicative competence, by examining adult-child and child-child interactions and by evaluating the structure and…

The aim of the study was to investigate how successfully pupils had learned content in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and to assess pupils' affective learning factors, such as motivation and self-esteem, in CLIL. Learning was presented in terms of achievement level, which was described as the relationship between measured levels…

The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span and tongue-twister), two-character Chinese pseudoword reading (two tasks), rapid automatized naming (RAN) (letters and numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 31 less competent comprehenders…

This report presents findings from the Massachusetts Family Child Care study, a two-year evaluation designed to examine the impacts on providers and children of an early childhood education program aimed at improving the development and learning opportunities in the care settings and, as a consequence, the outcomes for children in care. The early…