The study examined how learners' motivational dispositions predict the complexity, accuracy, fluency of their oral task performance and their overall second language proficiency. Eighty-one speakers of English as a second language in the United States completed a regulatory focus and a regulatory mode questionnaire, an oral interview task, and a…

Little evidence has been reported for narrative-related difficulties for Chinese Mandarin-speaking school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This study aimed to capture the indices from narratives that can differentiate Chinese children with and without DLD. Oral narrative and written narrative samples were collected from…

Purpose: This study examined the writing skills of English-French bilingual (EFbil) adolescents with extensive exposure to both languages in a two-majority language context. Method: Participants were EFbil adolescents (n = 26) and French near-monolinguals (FL1; n = 12) aged 12 to 17 years. All participants wrote image descriptions in French; EFbil…

Purpose: According to the interpersonal synergy model of spoken dialogue, interlocutors modify their communicative behaviors to meet the contextual demands of a given conversation. Although a growing body of research supports this postulation for linguistic behaviors (e.g., semantics, syntax), little is understood about how this model applies to…

Background: Research has demonstrated that distinct oral language skills contribute unique variance to text comprehension in students from second grade onward. This study examined these relationships for kindergarten students whose comprehension is often assumed to be determined by word decoding skills. Method: Eighty-eight kindergarten students…

This study investigates whether linguistic outcomes of second language (L2) learners' performance are consistent across oral and written modalities and, if so, whether the consistency remains across proficiency levels. The study also explores whether the linguistic outcomes of speaking, writing, or both are related to working memory capacity.…

This article compares the traditional and modern "speech production" patterns of the Kazakh language. By identifying the advantages of traditional speech structuring, the study proposes mechanisms for revitalizing modern Kazakh speech production, which is becoming increasingly simplified and distanced from its cognitive-aesthetic power…

Increased second language acquisition (SLA) research interest in the effect of planning on subsequent L2 oral production has typically examined the effect of planning on the syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and/or fluency (CALF) of L2 production. However, the results of research in this domain are inconclusive. This study, a…

This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4)…

Purpose: Measures of grammatical accuracy are effective measures of children's language skills. However, many measures, such as percent grammatical utterances, were developed for children who speak General American English (GAE) and, therefore, may not be appropriate for students who speak other dialects. This study examines different scoring…

The study examined storytelling prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in retelling a story) and the relation with oral language in Taiwanese preschool children. One hundred and twenty-eight preschool children aged 4 and 5 were recruited and given the following tasks: nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, syntax, and storytelling prosody. Children's…

Background and aims: Nongenerative speech is the rote repetition of words or phrases heard from others or oneself. The most common manifestations of nongenerative speech are immediate and delayed echolalia, which are a well-attested clinical feature and a salient aspect of atypical language use in autism. However, there are no current estimates of…

The purpose of this study was to compare developmental trajectories of oral language acquisition of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and children with typical hearing across the preschool years. Thirty children who are DHH who use amplification and spoken language and 31 children with typical hearing completed an early language and…

Purpose: To date, research on effects of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has focused on a broad range of cognitive impairments, but relatively few studies have examined effects of PAE on development of reading skills. Although PAE has been linked to poorer reading comprehension, it remains unclear whether this impairment is attributable to…

orInverse relations, or "trade-off effects," are a common outcome of interlanguage development: a learner may increase performance in one linguistic domain while simultaneously decreasing performance in another. In this study, we investigate the relationships between one aspect of fluency (pause usage) and two aspects of syntactic…