Language proficiency policies act as critical gatekeepers for multilingual international students (MIS) who intend to pursue an education at English-medium universities. The current study revisits the question of the predictive validity of a standardized English proficiency exam--International English Language Testing System (IELTS)--in comparison…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

This study examined the relationship of linguistic complexity, captured using a set of lexical richness, syntactic complexity, and discoursal complexity indices, to second language (L2) learners' perception of text difficulty, captured using L2 raters' comparative judgment on text comprehensibility and reading speed. Testing materials were 180…

Due to the fact that both the subject and the topic can occupy the initial position of the sentence, English subject is always deemed as the UNMARKED TOPIC (Lambrecht, 1994), while the topic is not always the subject. In accordance with Rizzi's (1997) topicalization, both the subject and the topicalized constituents can be topics. Many other…

The research studies presented in this special issue rest on two assumptions: firstly, that limitations in verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory (vSTM/WM) capacity are likely to be related to impairments in syntax, and secondly that this relationship is likely to be causal, with impairments in vSTM/WM causing impairments in syntax. In…

Purpose: Spelling is a skill that relies on an individual's linguistic awareness, the ability to overtly manipulate language. The ability to accurately spell is important for academic and career success into adulthood. The spelling skills of adults have received some attention in the literature, but there is limited information regarding which…

Background: Several statistical applications including Mplus, STATA, and R are available to conduct analyses such as structural equation modeling and multi-level modeling using large-scale assessment data that employ complex sampling and assessment designs and that provide associated information such as sampling weights, replicate weights, and…

Universals in natural language have long been a focus of the generative syntactic and typological literature. However, the source of these universals is not clear. Within Chomskyan generative syntactic literature, it is assumed that children are endowed with innate knowledge of language structure (see for example, Lightfoot 1999). However,…

Research on monolingual children has shown that listening comprehension is predicted by a range of language and cognitive skills; less is known about predictors of listening comprehension in bilingual children and about the role of language input. This study presents longitudinal data on predictors of English listening comprehension in 100…

Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions, as a subtype of Chinese multiword sequences, are challenging to acquire for second language (L2) learners. However, little is known about L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative DCs. This study investigated whether the acquisition of…

This study investigates whether statistical learning ability, conceptualized as a cognitive ability to learn regularities implicitly, is a good predictor for L2 learners' online language processing performance. Native-English-speaking adults, as a control group, and native-Korean-speaking adult L2 learners of English participated. They completed:…

Purpose: This study examined the frequency, direction, and structural characteristics of code-switching (CS) during narratives by Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) to determine whether children with DLD exhibit unique features in their CS that may inform clinical decision-making. Method:…

This research investigates disciplinary variations using syntactic features in Pakistani academic writing (AW). The corpus of this research is developed from 160 dissertations across four disciplinary divisions and analyzed through AntConc. Results reveal heterogeneous and homogenous use of the said features. Heterogeneity is seen in relation to…

Many students plagiarize unintentionally. Students are told that plagiarizing is claiming someone else's ideas or information as their own, and they are told to cite sources because failure to do so is dishonest and plagiarism has serious consequences. So, students are told to paraphrase, not plagiarize, but are they taught explicitly how to…

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students' development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, "Reflection";…