Compares the results from monolingual children with object omissions in bilingual children who have acquired two languages simultaneously. Claims that the difference between monolingual and bilingual children is due to crosslinguistic influences in bilingual children. (Author/VWL)

Comments are provided by ten authors in response to an article on language separation and crosslinguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Responds to comments by various researchers on an early article presented in the same issue of this journal, claiming that language separation and crosslinguistic influence coexist in bilingual first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Research in English for Academic Purposes has begun to show that non-native speakers of English have much difficulty in English academic listening at American universities. Chinese students, who are from a very different educational system and cultural environment, experience special challenges in English academic listening. This paper focuses on…

In this article, the author stresses the importance of welcoming preschoolers and babies into school libraries. She states that when read to from birth, a baby becomes used to the cadences and rhythms of spoken language, at the same time responding to the bright pictures and the presence of a loving adult. The baby associates books and stories…

This study investigates the causal coherence of deaf students' written narratives and the relation between students' use of causal structures in narrative writing and their linguistic skills. The written narratives of 17 deaf high school students were compared with those of 2 groups of hearing writers: 17 high school students and 16 second…

Purpose: Pragmatic language disorders (PLDs) are difficult to diagnose in a cost-effective manner, and there are few assessment tools that yield quantitative data. This investigation was designed to determine whether two formal assessment tools would differentiate PLDs in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) from controls matched on…

This article reports on a series of 5 analyses of spontaneous production of verbal inflection (tense and person-number agreement) by 2-year-olds acquiring French as a native language. A formal analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results is developed using the unique resources of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004). It is…

This investigation determined the effects of a treatment programme, "The Expression Connection" (1991), on the language organization of a firstgrade male child with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD). The methodology consisted of teaching the child story grammar components and the associated syntax requisite of their use. Treatment was…

Active spoken mastery of a foreign language all too often remains an illusive wish on the part of language learners. There is a tendency to seek the causes of non-fluency and accurate speech outside the classroom, for example, too little involvement, interest and time investment on the part of learners. In this article Manuela Macedonia asserts…

Reference profiles for characterizing the language abilities of elementary-grade African American students are important for assessment and instructional planning. H. K. Craig and J. A. Washington (2002) reported performance for 100 typically developing preschoolers and kindergartners on 5 traditional language measures: mean length of…

Previous research on typically developing children has shown that their memory for events depends on how they are encoded. As children grow older, they start to mention causal and temporal relationships between events, including psychological causes. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) were studied to disentangle the effects of…

Acquiring proficiency in different discourse genres involves an awareness of which syntactic structures are the most appropriate to the communicative context and purpose. This article examines two scientific research genres--conference proceedings articles and conference presentations--and compares the syntactic behaviour of a group of native…

The focus in studies of language awareness in L2 learning generally has been on the efficacy of teacher-generated attention to discrete elements of the forms of language through the manipulation of texts or corrective feedback. The study reported in this paper engaged learners in a collaborative task that involved learner-generated attention to…

A large cohort of 200 eleven-year-old children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were assessed on basic reading accuracy and on reading comprehension as well as language tasks. Reading skills were examined descriptively and in relation to early language and literacy factors. Using stepwise regression analyses in which age and nonverbal IQ…