This paper reports two studies that investigate differences in comprehension monitoring skills between good and poor comprehenders. Two groups of 9- to 10-year-olds, who were matched for reading vocabulary and word recognition skills but who differed in comprehension skill, were selected. In the first study, in which the children were required to…

The Wada test is at present the method of choice for preoperative assessment of patients who require surgery close to cortical language areas. It is, however, an invasive test with an attached morbidity risk. By now, an alternative to the Wada test is to combine a lexical word generation paradigm with non-invasive imaging techniques. However,…

The teaching of grammar is discussed from an instrumental point of view: what beneficial effects does such teaching have for students' language abilities (especially writing)? Two ways of approaching grammar teaching are confronted with each other: the learning of explicit rules and meta-linguistic knowledge about language on one hand and learning…

This empirical investigation compares the ability of adult multilingual learners of English to perform a metalinguistic task involving paying close attention to meaning and/or form in target utterances/sentences varying in semantic appropriateness and grammatical correctness. In a listening task, adult multilingual learners of English heard these…

Numerous findings suggest that non-native speech perception undergoes dramatic changes before the infant' s first birthday. Yet the nature and cause of these changes remain uncertain. We evaluated the predictions of several theoretical accounts of developmental change in infants' perception of non-native consonant contrasts. Experiment 1 assessed…

In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form "Do you live in [place name]?" produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of…

This study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (five- to seven-year olds, eleven- to twelve-year olds) and 35 adult native speakers of German listened to stem forms of verbs presented in a sentential context and were…

Reduced verbal working memory capacity has been proposed as a possible account of language impairments in specific language impairment (SLI). Studies have shown, however, that differences in strength of linguistic representations in the form of word frequency affect list recall and performance on verbal working memory tasks. This suggests that…

The author is presenting a program that she designed for teaching liaison interpreting to translation students in their fifth semester of the translation program at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), who are starting their training in liaison interpreting. The students never had any interpreting or translation training before. The…

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range=1;3-3;1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar…

The cognitive aspect of second language learning, specifically by immersion method, is discussed from a biological perspective. The approach taken is that of "connectionism," a recently-developed theoretical and experimental approach to human cognition. It is argued that while general cognitive functioning is unaffected by language immersion,…

This paper discusses the increasing use of computers and multimedia since 1989 in the foreign language classroom in the Czech Republic. Three categories of questions are discussed: (1) questions about computer use in classrooms that were common in Germany 10 years ago; (2) questions about computer use in relation to new foreign language…

This paper analyzes "confused history" on the part of students and where that confusion might originate. The study is based on a modified form of content analysis of articles by R. Lederer. The articles offer a compilation of student errors in history and geography. Two major categories of errors are recognized: (1) Type I, represented by errors…

It is proposed that a major obstacle for intermediate-level learners of English as a Second Language is the transition from thinking in the native language to thinking in English, that this transition must be made before proceeding from the intermediate level, and that it should begin as early as possible in language training. Early in-class…

This study investigated whether "avoidance" is an appropriate term to describe the linguistic behavior in which the learner with a particular first-language (L1) background tries to underproduce or underrepresent a particular second-language (L2) structure. The first section seeks to establish the general psycholinguistic principle that…