The nature of this research study examines the relationship between text-talking and writing skills used by American Sign Language (ASL) and English speakers. When given ample opportunity to text-talk in academic settings, it is likely that students will improve their expressive communication and writing skills. The main research question asks:…

Background: The ability to generate words that follow certain constraints, or verbal fluency, is a sensitive indicator of neurocognitive impairment, and is impacted by a variety of variables. Aims: To investigate the effect of post-stroke aphasia, elicitation category and linguistic variables on verbal fluency performance. Methods &…

Background: Identifying risk and protective factors for language development informs interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Maternal responsive and intrusive communicative behaviours are associated with language development. Mother-child interaction quality may influence how children use these behaviours in language…

Lexical access tasks are designed to measure efficiency of lexical access, but task demands and methods vary greatly. Many lexical access tasks do not account for confounding factors including competence in other linguistic abilities. In this study, preschoolers were given two lexical access tasks. In the single-category naming (SCN) task,…

This paper traces 9 non-English major EFL students and collects their oral productions in 4 successive oral exams in 2 years. The canonical correlation analysis approach of SPSS is adopted to study the disfluencies developmental traits under the influence of language acquisition development. We find that as language acquisition develops, the total…

This paper presents a framework for incorporating the assessment of psycholinguistic constructs into spoken language proficiency testing. Although response time and automaticity of language processing are vital factors in language acquisition, as constructs they are rarely explicitly assessed in language tests. It is proposed that efficiency of…

The study reported in this paper is an investigation of the nature of speaking proficiency in English as a second language in the context of a larger project to develop a rating scale for a new international test of English for Academic Purposes, TOEFL iBT (Brown et al. 2005). We report on a large-scale study of the relationship between detailed…

The English language portions of appropriate levels of the Language Assessment Scales (LAS) were administered to 193 English-speaking monolingual elementary school students. The students were aged 5-14, and had average reading achievement scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. On the basis of the publisher's norms, maturational trends in scores…

The oral language differences between Negro and Puerto Rican youngsters were compared in the hope that the study would be relevant to curriculum modifications for specific populations. Subjects (Ss) were five Negro and six Puerto Rican third grade girls in inner city classrooms. The facility of Ss in language use independent of vocabulary and…

The relationship between various aspects of mother-child interaction and the language performance of young disadvantaged Negro children is assessed in this study. An exploratory survey was conducted to determine if mothers in socially disadvantaged families were willing to enter a parent participation preschool program. Subjects for this study,…

Investigates the discourse coherence of school-aged children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children with SLI were found to be significantly impaired in the areas of topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness, conjunctive cohesion, and fluency. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed. (Author/ER)

To compare and contrast language development in 22 normal and 22 language handicapped children, aged five to eight, who speak Spanish as a first language, the study focused on differences and similarities in the children's Spanish. Handicapped children performed significantly worse than controls in production of syntactic features, though not in…

The purpose of this investigation was to design and test an information-eliciting question instrument in order to determine whether the structures in the verbal responses of young Mexican-American, bilingual children entering school would reveal the covert mental operations, concepts and oral language skills elicited. The basic objective was to…

Free speech samples and aural cloze test scores were collected from 24 Spanish-surnamed children at the beginning of first grade. The children were members of two classrooms, and each class received instruction from a Spanish-speaking bilingual teacher and an English-speaking monolingual teacher. The children were learning to read in Spanish and…