Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of…

The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to…

Generalised access to the Internet and globalisation has led to increased demand for translation services and a resurgence in the use of machine translation (MT) systems. MT post-editing or the correction of MT output to an acceptable standard is known to be one of the ways to face the huge demand on multilingual communication. Given that the use…

It is asserted that the optimum method of describing the stages of an interlanguage (IL) and the development of learner competency toward the target language (TL) is one of self-analysis and subsequent reanalysis. A nine-page letter written by a native speaker of German in 1987 is compared with her correction of the letter in 1991. Analyses…

Comparison of two methods for teaching grammatical exceptions in an introductory college French course suggested that the "Garden Path" technique, where teachers presented canonical exemplars encouraging students to induce the exception, was less effective than simply teaching the exception as an exception. (Author/CB)

This study reflects a social constructivist theoretical framework in which the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a central element, as two teaching approaches, communicative language teaching (CLT) and explicit focus on form (FonF) are examined. Research questions include: Are CLT and explicit FonF conducive to reaching the ZPD? Is there a…

Examines growth of word reading skills in first- and second-grade Italian children by analyzing the pattern of reading errors. Tailors the selection of reading material to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. Finds that, in English and Italian, spatially related errors constituted a…

Ten language-impaired children, aged 4-6, were found to exhibit more pronounced syntactic deficits than 10 normal children matched by mean length of utterance. Language samples were analyzed with respect to: grammatical marker need index; grammatical marker error index; and grammatical marker errors for nouns, verbs, bound, and unbound forms.…

In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As…

Production of the morpheme BE was studied among 22 children (ages 4-5) with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Contractible contexts were produced more accurately than uncontractible contexts by both groups, and there were no significant interactions between language status and contractibility. Copula forms were produced more…

Studied children with word finding difficulties who were identified through a wider survey of educational provision for those with language and communication difficulties. (Author/VWL)

To examine possible explanations of reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, study compared repetitions of 54 SLI children and peers for number and type of error, latency, and duration of response. Found no evidence of differences between groups in auditory discrimination or response…

The effectiveness and efficiency of two error correction procedures on word reading were compared. Three students with below average reading skills and one student with average reading skills were provided with weekly instruction on sets of 20 unknown words. Students' errors during instruction were followed by either word supply error correction…

Little attention has been devoted to date to the study of morphological knowledge in individuals with developmental dyslexia. The current study compares the ability of Hebrew-speaking adult dyslexic students and gradeschool children to analyze written words into their morphological components, using a linguistic analogy task. Two sets of…

Background: Narrative may provide a useful way in which to assess the language ability of adolescents with specific language impairment and may be more ecologically valid than standardized tests. However, the language of this age group is seldom studied and, furthermore, the effect of narrative genre has not been explored in detail. Methods &…