The aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994) proposes that language learners are initially influenced by the inherent semantic aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect (TA) morphology. Perfective past emerges earlier with accomplishments and achievements and progressive with activities. Although this hypothesis has been extensively…

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that…

Major innovations are becoming available for research in language development and disorders. Among these innovations, recent tools allow naturalistic recording in children's homes and automated analysis to facilitate representative sampling. This study employed all-day recordings during the 2nd year of life in a child exposed to three languages,…

After a teaching experience with the children of Ecuador with so little support, the author has come to greatly appreciate what is available for teachers in the states. Sometimes the best encouragement for a new teacher of FLES is a success story straight from the classroom. In this article, the author shares a few of the tools she has picked up…

Error diagnosis in ICALL typically analyzes learner input in an attempt to abstract and identify indicators of the learner's (mis)conceptions of linguistic properties. For written input, this process usually starts with the identification of tokens that will serve as the atomic building blocks of the analysis. In this paper, we discuss the…

Studies examining factors that influence when words are learned typically investigate one lexical category or a small set of words. We provide the first evaluation of the relation between input frequency and age of acquisition for a large sample of words. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory provides norming data on age of…

This article investigates an argument-adjunct asymmetry in English as a second language (ESL) learners' acquisition of inversion in "wh"-questions. A generative approach (DeVilliers, 1991; Stromswold, 1990) claims that inversion is acquired earlier in argument "wh"-questions than in adjunct "wh"-questions, the asymmetry resulting from their…

The input enhancement hypothesis proposed by Sharwood Smith (1991, 1993) has stimulated considerable research over the last 15 years. This article reviews the research on textual enhancement of input (TE), an area where the majority of input enhancement studies have aggregated. Methodological idiosyncrasies are the norm of this body of research.…

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some…

The problem. This research study explores an important issue in the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and second language acquisition (SLA). Its purpose is to examine the relationship between Vietnamese students' L1 grammar knowledge and their English grammar proficiency. Furthermore, it investigates the extent to…

Purpose: This study assesses the factors that contribute to Spanish and English language development in bilingual children. Method: Seven hundred and fifty-seven Hispanic prekindergarten and kindergarten-age children completed screening tests of semantic and morphosyntactic development in Spanish and English. Parents provided information about…

Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children's performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density…

This study examines the nature of the involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) in second language (L2) lexical input processing through reading by considering the effects of the reader-based factors of L2 reading proficiency and background knowledge. The lexical input processing aspects investigated were lexical inferencing (search), attentional…

The problem: Many previous studies have pointed out that EFL learners tend to face communication breakdowns with native speakers because their traditional classroom and textbooks are not able to provide learners with sufficient pragmatically appropriate input (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996; Rose, 1994, 1997). On the contrary, they are exposed to rich input…

This research investigated Spanish-English bilingual adults' initial learning of a third language (L3), Latin, comparing the learning processes and outcomes of early- and late-onset bilinguals. Thirty-three participants were classified as Early or Late Bilinguals according to their age of arrival to the USA, and they were introduced to Latin by…