This paper presents some of the preliminary findings of a study into modern languages (ML) learning in five Scottish secondary schools. Five ML teachers were observed and audio-recorded over a period of several weeks while teaching their third-year classes (pupils aged 14-15 years). All the teachers used the target language extensively in their…

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was…

Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. Cognition, 89, B65-B73.] claim experimental substantiation of an argument from the poverty of the stimulus, in the sense of Pullum and Scholz [Linguist. Rev. 19 (2002) 9].…

In "What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered" (1999) Fiona Cowie addresses three questions: (1) What is nativism? (2) What is meant by calling some trait "innate"? and (3) What types of evidence should be offered when claiming innateness? This review concentrates on these questions as they pertain to Chomsky's faculties-based account of language…

The recent neuroimaging literature gives conflicting evidence about whether the left fusiform gyrus (FG) might recognize words as unitary visual objects. The sensitivity of the left FG to word frequency might provide a neural basis for the orthographic input lexicon theorized by reading models [Patterson, K., Marshall, J. C., & Coltheart, M.…

The article is based on a national survey in Norway of the linguistic situation of deaf children. Parents, teachers, and children were asked to make judgments on topics related to the children's' language milieu at home and at school by means of detailed questions using two response methods: a language inventory and rating scales. The inventory is…

The large and rapidly expanding body of literature on bilingual acquisition is mostly comprised of either single-case or cross-sectional studies. While these studies have made major contributions to our understanding of bilingual children's language development, they do not allow researchers to compare and contrast results with regard to…

Given the raised graduation requirement of the proficiency Enhancement Program (PEP) to attain proficiency levels of "2+," "2+," and "2," the importance of target language use has been highly emphasized across language schools at Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). This article discusses some of the challenges associated…

This paper presents the findings of an experiment in which 20 Greek Deaf students produced written texts under two different conditions of language input: (1) a translation from a videotaped story in Greek sign language, and (2) a direct composition produced from a picture story--a neutral non-linguistic input. Placing Deaf writing within a…

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…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) lag behind children with typical language (TL) in their grammatical development, despite equivalent early exposure to recasts in conversation (M. E. Fey, T. E. Krulik, D. F. Loeb, & K. Proctor-Williams, 1999) and the ability to learn from recasts in intervention as quickly as do children…

Responds to Ellis (2002), which suggests the statistical structure of the linguistic environment is a crucial and relatively neglected variable in language learning. This approach makes three assumptions about cognition and language learning that are not universally shared. Describes a distributed, instance-based approach that retains key features…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the use of the student's first language (L1) by a non-native English-speaking EFL teacher affects the students' experiences in learning English compared to those in the classrooms where only English is used as a means of teaching. This study also investigates the role of the teacher in providing…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

This study examines the pragmatic strategies that learners utilize to negotiate a resolution when refusing a native speaker of higher status in three asymmetric situations (+Power, +Distance). Following Pomerantz's (1984) analysis of dispreferred responses, this study focuses on refusals to an invitation, a request, and a suggestion. Refusal…