The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of Korean case particles in a Korean-English bilingual child with specific language impairment (SLI). The child's production of four types of Korean case particles were compared to those of three typically developing children during probe and storytelling tasks. The Korean-English bilingual…

It is commonly recognized that, for lecturers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in a university setting, the goal of their teaching is to develop learners' ability to communicate appropriately in this language. This means that teaching practices should pay attention not only to the key features of the linguistic system of English, but also to…

Why is it that young children use connectives correctly in conversation, yet frequently err when asked to use the same connectives in formal reasoning? One possibility is that connective acquisition is item-based in which usage rules are induced from natural language input. This possibility was evaluated by examining the correspondence between the…

Researchers have suggested that there is a noun bias in children's early vocabularies brought about by features of adults' child-directed utterances, which may vary across languages (E. V. Bates et al., 1994; D. Gentner, 1982). In the present study, the authors explored noun bias in 60 Filipino-English bilingual children whose 2 languages differed…

LChildren pass through a stage in development when they produce utterances that contain auxiliary BE ("he's playing") and utterances where auxiliary BE is omitted ("he playing"). One explanation that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is the presence of questions in the input that model S-V word order (Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello,…

This paper presents a series of experiments that tested the usefulness of teaching Spanish mood using an approach to Cognitive Grammar specifically developed for the foreign language classroom: "Operational Grammar." Mood selection is one of the most difficult aspects of learning Spanish as a FL, and it is one of the last features…

This study examined the effectiveness of reformulation and model text in a three-stage writing task (composing-comparison-revising) in an EFL writing class in a Beijing university. The study documented 10 university students' writing performance from the composing (Stage 1) and comparing (Stage 2, where students compare their own text to a…

This longitudinal case study tracks an adult second-language (L2) learner's quality and quantity of encounters with 20 vocabulary items in an English for Academic Purposes course over 3 months. The learner completed pretest and posttest vocabulary knowledge interviews, submitted course materials and notes for analysis, and was observed during…

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…

This article investigates the effect of age of first exposure and the quantity and quality of input to which non-native acquirers (L2ers) are exposed in their acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Data from 103 English-speaking children, preteens and adults were analyzed for gender agreement on definite determiners. It was observed that…

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as "Is the boy who smoking is crazy?" because they have innate knowledge of "structure dependence" and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid…

This study examined information about adjective meanings available in adults' spoken discourse in the original 27 CHILDES corpora of typically developing English-speaking children. In order to increase the probability that adjectives would be novel to children to whom they were addressed, only "rare" adjectives were examined (those that occurred…