Research on monolingual children has shown that listening comprehension is predicted by a range of language and cognitive skills; less is known about predictors of listening comprehension in bilingual children and about the role of language input. This study presents longitudinal data on predictors of English listening comprehension in 100…

This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…

The ability to automatically assess the quality of paraphrases can be very useful for facilitating literacy skills and providing timely feedback to learners. Our aim is twofold: a) to automatically evaluate the quality of paraphrases across four dimensions: lexical similarity, syntactic similarity, semantic similarity and paraphrase quality, and…

The present study investigated the effect of classroom-based syntactic training on children's abilities to produce passive sentences. Thirty-three monolingual English children (mean age 5;2), were involved in passive-voice training based on storytelling sessions within a priming design. The training was delivered in a classroom setting, with two…

Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

With the advent of communicative methodologies, the promise to develop both fluency and accuracy was made as a goal for teaching and learning English as an international language. However, it did not happen (Richards, 2008). In an attempt to equalize students' both semantic and syntactic competence, this study investigates the impact of Swain's…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

This experimental study examined how the reading and writing development of sixth-grade L2 students was affected by syntactic enhancement. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology, which visualizes syntactic structures, was used to convert a textbook to the one with syntactic enhancement. The sample (n = 282), which was drawn from a…

Research suggests that characteristics of EFL input cause morphosyntactic features to be acquired in an order dissimilar to that found in ESL contexts. To determine whether acquisition order for Korean learners could be explained by characteristics of their EFL input, a Korean elementary school curriculum was analyzed. Morphosyntactic features…

The present investigation is a study of the definitional style of nouns and verbs in typically developing school-age children. A total of 30 children in upper-elementary grades provided verbal definitions for 10 common high-frequency nouns (e.g., apple, boat, baby) and 10 common high- frequency verbs (e.g., climb, sing, throw). All definitions…