Response onset latencies for sentences that start with a conjoined noun phrase are typically longer than for sentences starting with a simple noun phrase. This suggests that advance planning has phrasal scope, which may or may not be lexically driven. All previous studies have involved spoken production, leaving open the possibility that effects…

This study was designed to investigate the effects of incidental unfocused prompts and recasts on improving English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' grammatical accuracy as measured in students' oral interviews and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) grammar test. The design of the study was quasi-experimental with pre-tests,…

Chinese EFL learners may have difficulty in speaking fluent and accurate English, for their speaking competence are likely to be influenced by cognitive, linguistic and affective factors. With the aim to enhance those learners' oral proficiency, this paper first discusses three effective models of teaching English speaking, and then proposes a…

This experimental study investigates event construal by early Dutch-German bilinguals, as reflected in their oral depiction of everyday events shown in video clips. The starting point is the finding that the expression of an aspectual perspective (progressive aspect), and its consequences for event construal, is dependent on the extent to which…

Negotiation of language form is thought to engage learning processes by helping learners to notice gaps in their developing L2 and find target-like ways of filling them. Self-transcription, where learners work together to find language errors in recordings of their own oral output, is an awareness raising exercise that encourages such negotiation.…

We report two sets of experiments showing that the large individual variability in language learning success in adults can be attributed to neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, cognitive, and perceptual factors. In the first set of experiments, native English-speaking adults learned to incorporate lexically meaningfully pitch patterns in words. We…

Spoken language comprehension is known to involve a large left-dominant network of fronto-temporal brain regions, but there is still little consensus about how the syntactic and semantic aspects of language are processed within this network. In an fMRI study, volunteers heard spoken sentences that contained either syntactic or semantic ambiguities…

SLA researchers agree that explicit knowledge and learning play an important role in adult L2 development. In the field of cognitive linguistics, it has been proposed that implicit and explicit knowledge differ in terms of their internal category structure and the processing mechanisms that operate on their representation in the human mind. It has…

In this study, framed within a sociocultural theory of mind, we explore the role of languaging in mediating between students' understanding of a grammatical concept and their written production of the forms related to that concept. The development of scientific concepts, in this case of the concept of voice in French, involves the use of language…

The main purpose of this article is to review studies that have investigated the effects of three types of planning (rehearsal, pre-task planning, and within-task planning) on the fluency, complexity, and accuracy of L2 performance. All three types of planning have been shown to have a beneficial effect on fluency but the results for complexity…

It has been a matter of debate whether the specifically human capacity to process syntactic information draws on attentional resources or is automatic. To address this issue, we recorded neurophysiological indicators of syntactic processing to spoken sentences while subjects were distracted to different degrees from language processing. Subjects…

Suggests that various parts of the grammar of American Sign Language--particularly its verb and pronoun system--give convincing evidence that such grammar cannot have derived from the grammars of spoken languages; rather the continuity is from cognitive activity expressed in gSigns toward linguistic organization both of the expressive material and…

Reports two experiments that assessed the role of orthography in constraining subject verb agreement in written and spoken French. Contrasted a condition in which the singular and plural forms of the subject head nouns were homophones but non-homographs with a condition in which the subject head ones were homophones and homographs in their…

Two studies are discussed. The first tested the effect of intervening material on the processing of subject-verb number agreement in Alzheimer's Disease patients and in normal elderly adults. The second examined the effect of intervening material on the processing of pronoun-antecedent number agreement in the same patients. (Author/VWL)

Studied the linguistic competence in the written language of deaf children and adults and the linguistic development in children and adolescents with Williams Syndrome. Presents qualitative data on spoken and written Italian from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies conducted over the last 10 years. Studying these two different populations can…