Assesses the contributions made by different approaches to interlanguage pragmatics as a subfield of second language acquisition. Discusses how four particular perspectives on pragmatic development relate to each other. (Author/VWL)

In this response to Pinker and Jackendoff's critique, we extend our previous framework for discussion of language evolution, clarifying certain distinctions and elaborating on a number of points. In the first half of the paper, we reiterate that profitable research into the biology and evolution of language requires fractionation of ''language''…

Persian Languages is one of the widespread branches of Indo-European languages that for long have comprised several important languages. The importance of these languages which lies in the strength of Median, Achamenian, Parthian, and Sasanid Empires during different eras caused a number of researchers to increase their studies about these…

In recent years, a number of researchers in the field of second language acquisition have voiced discontent regarding the tendency of second language acquisition (SLA) research to be conducted within a framework of cognitive science (Firth and Wagner, 1997; Atkinson, 2002; Johnson, 2004). Watson-Gegeo (2004) expresses this same discontent, and…

Journal editorials allow readers to select the most deserving contributions in the literature and adopt approaches or procedures endorsed by an authority in the field; they act as gatekeepers to the community of practice and at the same time allow editors to connect directly with their readership. Following a number of studies on the structure and…

Consonant mastery is one of the most widely used metrics of typical phonological acquisition and of phonological disorder. Two fundamental methodological questions concerning research on consonant acquisition are (1) how to elicit a representative sample of productions and (2) how to analyse this sample once it has been collected. This paper…

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken…

Whereas most research in SLA assumes the relationship between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) to be unidirectional, this study investigates the possibility of a bidirectional relationship. We examine the domain of manner of motion, in which monolingual Japanese and English speakers differ both in speech and gesture. Parallel…

The essence of my argument is that Practitioner Research can be pursued not only by observing whole classes, but also by observing what happens when a teacher talks to a student outside of the classroom setting. What this setting offers to practitioner-researchers is a unique opportunity to understand what both the teacher and the student do to…

This study examines how Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) intersects with the typological characteristics of Korean in the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs). Korean has two types of RC constructions: head-external and head-internal. The head-external relative has its head to the right of the RC, whereas the…

Although digital scholarship is now well established in academia, there is no consensus about how it should be evaluated for tenure and promotion. Is digital publication acceptable as a way to disseminate research? Is the digital medium appropriate for conducting research? To what degree does creating digital materials--from research instruments…

Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded…

This article discusses sociolinguistically oriented research on second language acquisition (SLA) in the decade since Firth and Wagner (1997). Over the last 10 years, substantial progress has been made in developing a model of the sociolinguistic processes that inform second language acquisition. This model is supported by empirical evidence on…

Deviances in early event-related potential (ERP) components reflecting auditory and phonological processing are well-documented in children at familial risk for dyslexia. However, little is known about brain responses which index processing in other linguistic domains such as lexicon, semantics and syntax in this group. The present study…

Sensitivity to prosodic cues might be used to constrain lexical search. Indeed, the prosodic organization of speech is such that words are invariably aligned with phrasal prosodic edges, providing a cue to segmentation. In this paper we devise an experimental paradigm that allows us to investigate the interaction between statistical and prosodic…