As a group, children with hearing loss demonstrate delays in language development relative to their peers with normal hearing. Early intervention has a profound impact on language outcomes in children with hearing loss. Data examining the relationship between degree of hearing loss and language outcomes are variable. Two approaches are used in the…

In this article, the author investigates the experience of six preservice teachers who volunteered to work with English language learners (ELLs). For this project, the preservice teachers would meet with their students to conduct one-on-one interviews about their reading and writing, hold conferences with them, and share their own writing as well.…

In general, talking with young children encourages development in many areas: (1) spoken language; (2) early literacy; (3) cognitive development; (4) social skills; and (5) emotional maturity. Speaking with children in increasingly complex and responsive ways does this even better. This article explores research findings about the effects of…

Currently, there are no Hebrew (L2) reading assessments that have been tested to obtain evidence for reliability and validity on which to base decisions about Hebrew instruction. The authors developed a Hebrew benchmark assessment tool for first grade students modeled after Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, a standardized test of…

This longitudinal study investigated 196 Hispanic English learners' responses to an English instructional intervention from kindergarten to second grade. The effect of student gender was also examined as a secondary focus. The intervention consisted of ongoing professional development and structured and systematic English intervention during an…

Over the past few decades perspectives on second language (L2) pronunciation have evolved from pessimistic appraisals of the capabilities of L2 learners and doubts about the value of instruction to a view of pronunciation teaching as an effective and important part of language pedagogy. Earlier research on the teaching of pronunciation dwelt…

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) contracted with Synergy Enterprises, Inc. and edCount, LLC, to complete a study titled Language Instruction Educational Programs (LIEPs): Lessons From the Research and Profiles of Promising Programs. This study includes a review of the foundational literature related to LIEPs, case studies…

This study examined the effects of lexical frequency on children's production of accurate primary stress in words derived with nonneutral English suffixes. Forty-four third-grade children participated in an elicited derived word task in which they produced high-frequency, low-frequency, and nonsense-derived words with stress-changing suffixes…

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt…

Four experiments used the psychological refractory period logic to examine whether integration of multiple sources of phonemic information has a decisional locus. All experiments made use of a dual-task paradigm in which participants made forced-choice color categorization (Task 1) and phoneme categorization (Task 2) decisions at varying stimulus…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…

This paper presents a research report on an investigation into the reading eye movements of a bilingual 10-year, 10-month old girl with language impairment secondary to Downs Syndrome. Eye movement miscue analysis (Paulson, 2000) was employed to evaluate the visual sampling and oral productions of this child as she read from complete texts…

With a goal of investigating psycholinguistic bases of spoken word processing in a second language (L2), this study examined L2 learners' sensitivity to phonological information in spoken L2 words as a function of their L2 experience and attentional demands of a learning task. Fifty-two Chinese learners of English who differed in amount of L2…

Second language (L2) learners must often learn to perceive and produce novel L2 phoneme contrasts. Although both research and intuition suggest that these difficulties can be overcome to some extent with exposure to the L2, it is not known what consequences this kind of learning has for the phonological structure of the L2 lexicon. We present an…

Null direct objects provide a favourable testing ground for grammatical and performance models of argument omission. This article examines both types of models in order to determine which gives a more plausible account of the second language data. The data were collected from second language (L2) learners of Spanish by means of four oral…