Reading numbers aloud, a central aspect of numerical literacy, is a challenging skill to acquire, but the origins of this difficulty remain poorly understood. To investigate this matter, we examined the performance of 127 third- and fourth-grade children who read aloud, in Hebrew, numbers with 2-5 digits. We found several key observations. First,…

Relative clauses (RCs) are complex syntactic structures because they consist of multiple clauses and involve syntactic movement. RCs are known as a reliable clinical marker of syntactic impairment across many different languages and populations. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with the comprehension and production of RCs,…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

Written and spoken language samples for 13 students with hearing impairments (HI) attending special classes in Tel Aviv, Israel, and 9 normal hearing students were analyzed for grammatical deviations. HI students exhibited significantly more deviations in written than spoken language samples, especially failure to supply morphological markers,…

An informal diagnostic spelling test of Hebrew as a second language was constructed and administered to 30 students, 8 boys and 22 girls, in a Jewish middle and high school. As evidenced by the subjects in this study, spelling errors in Hebrew tended to centralize in four areas: (1) the spelling patterns according to grammatical and phonetic…

This study investigates plural noun forms in Modern Hebrew to show that the pattern of regularization differs for specific words, rather than for classes of words. Early regularization, in which the children add a plural suffix with no stem change, applies unconditionally. Subsequently, the pattern changes and while some words are still…

Proposes to examine reading problems by means of discourse analysis of students' translations. The study is based on two previous experiments in which first-year university students translated English texts into their native language (Hebrew or Arabic). (37 references) (Author/VWL)

This study examines the occurrence of transfer in the simultaneous acquisition of French and Hebrew by 57 native English-speaking children in a primary grades French/Hebrew immersion program in Montreal. The study focuses on three issues: (1) whether transfer of genetically related first and second languages differs quantitatively and…

Examines native Hebrew- or Arabic-speaking students' translations from English into their native language as a means of evaluating reading comprehension. Results show that mistranslations in vocabulary, expressions, and utterance-level were good indicators of lack of comprehension. (Author/CB)

Describes the evaluation of Computronics Corporations'"Targumatic" (Hebrew into English), a PC-based machine translation system running under DOS, and shows how each problem and potential obstruction to learning can be overcome through discovery procedures using a set of tools and procedures called the "learning algorithm." (22…

This paper discusses the meaning of the term "lexical simplification" in the context of second language acquisition. It is suggested that simplification be viewed as a universal feature of language use which may be manifested in a number of linguistic contexts, including the creation of a learner's interlanguage. It is further suggested…

Follows up on a study by Dagut and Laufer (1985), who found that Hebrew learners of English avoid phrasal verbs. Three tests (multiple choice, memorization, and translation) were administered to Dutch learners of English to determine whether Dutch learners would tend not to avoid English phrasal verbs because they do not exist in Dutch. (Author/OD)

An ongoing research project into the dissolution or attrition of native language structure under the influence of bilingualism analyzed certain paradigmatic changes in the first language of a Hungarian-Hebrew bilingual speaker. Data were collected over a 2-year period from an Israeli woman who was born in Hungary and immigrated to Israel at 6…