Mandarin Chinese and Spanish are both considered aspect languages for the simple reason that they both mark grammatical aspect morphologically: the former attaches a particle expressing only aspectual meaning to the root of a verb, while the latter attaches a suffix expressing both aspectual and tense meaning to the root of a verb. Since tense…

Background: Physically manipulating objects according to texts can improve reading performance. This study examined whether these benefits can also be achieved via observing these manipulations or whether, because of an additional involvement of an action system, the physical manipulation might induce larger effects. Methods: In total, 134 second…

The purpose of this meta-synthesis is to formulate a hypothesis concerning the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition for typically developed Arabic readers. I propose that the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition varies as a function of grade level, stimuli frequency, and text affiliation. Stimuli…

Purpose: The aim of this article was to explore how the type of allomorph (e.g., past tense buzz[ d ] vs. nod[ ?d ]) influences the ability to perceive and produce grammatical morphemes in children with typical development and with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: The participants were monolingual Australian English--speaking children.…

In this study we present a picture database of 160 nouns and 160 verbs. All verbs and nouns are divided into two groups as action and non-action words. Age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, name agreement and complexity norms are reported alongside frequency, word length and morpheme count for each word. Data were collected from 600…

Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the emergence of English tense marking in young (Spanish-English) dual language learners (DLLs) over 4 consecutive academic semesters, addressing the need for longitudinal data on typical acquisition trajectories of English in DLL preschoolers. Method: Language sample analysis was conducted on 139…

This study investigated the influence of L1 allophonic rule, L1 segment articulation, and gender in Korean learners' production of English /s/ in two different contexts (i.e., before a high front vowel vs. elsewhere) and at three different proficiency levels in English (i.e., low vs. intermediate vs. high). The influence of the Korean allophonic…

This study expands on previous research in concept-based instruction (CBI) by investigating the use of the grammatical concept of aspect as a tool to mediate decision making during tasks. Specifically, this article reports the findings of a longitudinal case study that examines one student's explanations for his choice of French past tense…

The current study aimed to explore the effect of first language (L1) orthography on second language (L2) Chinese morphological awareness. One hundred and twenty-nine students (61 L1 English readers and 68 L1 Thai readers) who studied Chinese as a second language participated in this study. They completed four tasks of morphological awareness…

This study scrutinized the development of Iranian intermediate EFL learners' reading comprehension through the employment of three methods of morphological awareness (i.e. Textual Enhancement (TE), Metalinguistic Explanation (ME) and Morpheme Recognition Task (MRT). To do so, 90 intermediate EFL learners were divided into three groups, each group…

Reading comprehension in L2 has been shown to be correlated to vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. However, little is known about the relative contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge in this language competence. In the present study we investigated the contribution of morphosyntactic knowledge of some particular grammatical elements to the…

The Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., "tui dao" "push fall" and "pa shang" "climb ascend") encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we…

In this study, verb placement with respect to negation is investigated in elicited production and elicited sentence imitation data collected with child second language (L2) learners of German. These data are compared to published data from adult L2 learners, which were collected with the same elicitation materials and were re-analysed for the…

Purpose: Language production in semantic dementia (SD) is characterized by a lexical-semantic deficit and largely preserved argument structure and inflection production. This study investigates (a) the effect of argument structure on verb retrieval and (b) the interrelation between inflection marking and verb retrieval in SD. Method: Seven…

Text-To-Speech synthesizers (TTS) have raised the interest of researchers and teachers for their ability to enhance foreign/second language (L2) learning, particularly with regards to the development of pronunciation skills (Liakin, Cardoso, & Liakina, 2017). Despite some optimistic results, there are no studies that investigate TTS's…