Presents a review of selected influential works in Spanish applied linguistics in the twentieth century, with an accompanying bibliography. The research is divided into four eras, which are defined by "paradigm shifts" that occur when significant changes are perceived in the following areas: psychological/second language acquisition theories,…

Discusses relative clauses in Hong Kong English and considers questions about its morphosyntactic feature system, comparing relevant attestations from local data to those found in other varieties of English. Examines ways relative constructions in Cantonese may affect how relative clauses in Hong Kong English are formed and how the relative clause…

Re-examines the case of the "pseudo-passive," an interlanguage structure considered typical of first-language Chinese learners of second language English. Earlier approaches to the analysis of the structure--typological and syntactic--are reviewed and an alternative approach--discourse-syntactic--is proposed to bridge a methodological…

This longitudinal case study examined measures of segmental phonology, nonsegmental phonology, and syntax/morphology in a child with language impairment in order to illustrate the effectiveness of a format for longitudinally tracking interactions among measures representing different domains of communication. The format detected trade-offs and…

Children using Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) picture boards often produce sequences of symbols that do not reflect the grammatical structure of the language spoken in their environment. Graphic symbols or pictures may be interpreted as global representations of meaning rather than as individual components to be sequenced into…

Purpose: Persuasive writing is a demanding task that requires the use of complex language to analyze, discuss, and resolve controversies in a way that is clear, convincing, and considerate of diverse points of view. This investigation examined selected aspects of later language development in the context of persuasive writing. The purpose of the…

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)…

An important problem for a language learner is identifying how properties of argument structure are realized morphosyntactically in the particular language they are learning. Speakers of some L1s overgeneralize the morphosyntactic reflexes of the movement of Theme objects in English to unaccusative intransitive verbs, using passive morphology in…

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…

This study looks at the syllable onset interval (SOI) patterning in Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech and its relationship to discourse and syntactic units. Monologs were elicited by asking readers to tell stories depicted in comic strips and were transcribed and segmented into Discourse Segment Units (Grosz & Sidner, 1986), clauses, and…

Comprehension of relative clauses was assessed in 10 Hebrew-speaking school-age children with syntactic SLI and in two groups of younger children with normal language development. Comprehension of subject- and object-relatives was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The findings were that while Hebrew-speaking children with…