Analyzed a modern spoken corpus of English (the CANCODE corpus) and found that 2,000 word families made up less than 95% coverage. A second analysis was performed on the CANCODE and the spoken component of the British National Corpus, which found that around 5,000 individual words were required to achieve about a 96 % coverage feature. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the effects of contextual demands on French-speaking children's spontaneous production of cleft sentences. The study shows that French children frequently produce cleft formulations when they contrast their own belief or knowledge with that of their addressee and when the matter of the disagreement concerns the agent of the action. (CB)

Analysis of a conversation with an Alzheimer's disease sufferer with word-finding problems revealed that social context, speaker characteristics, and awareness of the other speaker's perspective governed such conversational aspects of turn taking and turn giving, which allowed full development of both speakers' personas. (23 references) (CB)

Discusses how listeners compensate for coarticulatory influences of one speech sound on another and examines whether lipread information penetrates this perceptual compensation mechanism. Results of three experiments indicate that biasing of the fricative by lipread information and compensation for coarticulation can be dissociated. (Author/VWL)

The aim of this article is to provide clinicians and researchers a comprehensive overview of the development and functions of gesture in childhood and in select populations with developmental language impairments. Of significance is the growing body of evidence that gesture enhances, not hinders, language development. In both normal and impaired…

Although school- and university-based language programs can help strengthen threatened Indigenous languages, language revitalization at its heart involves reestablishing traditional functions of language use in the context of everyday speaker interactions. The inherent dynamics of Native oral language traditions suggest the limitations of…

B. Rapp and M. Goldrick (2000) claimed that the lexical and mixed error biases in picture naming by aphasic and nonaphasic speakers argue against models that assume a feedforward-only relationship between lexical items and their sounds in spoken word production. The author contests this claim by showing that a feedforward-only model like WEAVER++…

Written specifically for K-12 educators, this accessible book explains the processes involved in second-language acquisition and provides a wealth of practical strategies for helping English language learners (ELLs) succeed at reading. The authors integrate knowledge from two fields that often remain disconnected--linguistics and literacy--with a…

The utmost goal of foreign language instruction is aimed at helping the learner master the language. At the same time the learner shall become equipped with linguistic, pragmatic and social-linguistic competence. This study was done to explore if review activities in EFL classes should be mandatory for learners to learn the new knowledge. One…

Study abroad (SA) is one of the flagship offerings among United States higher education institutions. Approximately 220,000 students studied abroad in the 2005/2006 academic year, 52.8% of whom studied on programs that lasted eight weeks or less. The effect of these short-term programs on second language development has been little investigated,…

Perceptions of Asian students as silent have been widely debated in the disciplines of applied linguistics and education. These debates have been largely concerned with the extent to which essentialised notions of Japanese culture are in operation and the consequences for teaching and learning. The silences of students and the expectations of…

Speaking tasks involving peer-to-peer candidate interaction are increasingly being incorporated into language proficiency assessments, in both large-scale international testing contexts, and in smaller-scale, for example course-related, ones. This growth in the popularity and use of paired and group orals has stimulated research, particularly into…

This paper investigates the development of referring expressions in the narratives of children learning English as a second language (L2). Spoken narratives in English were elicited from sixty Chinese-speaking participants at four ages--five, eight, ten, and young adults--using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" (Mayer, 1969).…

Teaching students with intellectual disabilities (ID) to read is extremely challenging. Fortunately, the outlook for students with ID is improving because we now know much more about how to teach reading to students who struggle, including those with ID. The central theme of this article is that reading instruction for students with ID must be a…

Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is a cognitive challenge for foreign language learners. Varied exposures to newly acquired words as they occur in meaningful contexts may facilitate the process of vocabulary learning. In this study we investigated the effects of such a multiple-strategy-based vocabulary teaching approach. We conducted an…