Background: The purpose of this study is to investigate the pragmatic abilities of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Several studies in the literature have previously reported communicative deficits in individuals with TBI, however such research has focused principally on communicative deficits in general, without providing an…

This article takes a contrarian position: an "instructional design" or "teacher training" model, because of the sheer number of its interconnected parameters, is too complex to assess or to compare with other models. Models may not be the way to go just yet. This article recommends instead prior experimental research on limited…

The ability of language-impaired children to maintain coherence by using discourse connectives has so far been assessed by quantitative measures. This study is a first attempt to scrutinize the "quality" of connective use in specific language impairment (SLI). The authors investigate whether Russian-speaking children reveal sensitivity…

Two experiments investigated Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) adolescents' recognition of category names in an innovative task of semantic categorization. In each trial, the category-name target appeared briefly at the screen center followed by two words or two pictures for two basic-level exemplars of high or middle typicality, which…

This study develops a tool to identify errors in the presentation of natural laws based on the epistemology and ontology of the Scientific Realism of Mario Bunge. The tool is able to identify errors of different types: (1) epistemological, in which the law is incorrectly presented as data correlation instead of as a pattern of causality; (2)…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the development of morphosyntactic accuracy and grammatical complexity in Dutch school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Morphosyntactic accuracy, the use of dummy auxiliaries, and complex syntax were assessed using a narrative task that was administered at three points…

Navigational and reaching spaces are known to involve different cognitive strategies and brain networks, whose development in humans is still debated. In fact, high-level spatial processing, including allocentric location encoding, is already available to very young children, but navigational strategies are not mature until late childhood. The…

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…

This study explored the extent to which the ethnic identity of a writer and the background (gender and area of teaching) of a rater can influence mainstream teacher candidates' evaluation of English as a second language (ESL) writing, using a matched-guise method. A one-page essay was elicited from an ESL learner enrolled in an intensive English…

While oral corrective feedback is a principal focus in second language acquisition research, most studies examine feedback once it has been provided. Investigating how instructors make in-class feedback decisions has not been thoroughly explored, despite the fact that classroom feedback occurs at the discretion of the individual language…

Despite the recent development of automated writing evaluation (AWE) technology and the growing interest in applying this technology to language classrooms, few studies have looked at the effects of using AWE on reducing grammatical errors in L2 writing. This study identified the primary English grammatical error types made by 66 Taiwanese…

This paper addresses the process of transcribing and annotating spontaneous non-native speech with the aim of compiling a training corpus for the development of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) applications, enhanced with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. To better adapt ASR technology to CAPT tools, the recognition…

Systematic errors can cause measurements to deviate from the actual value of the quantity being measured. Faulty equipment (such as a meterstick that is not marked correctly), inaccurate calibration of measuring devices (such as a scale to measure mass that has not been properly zeroed), and improper use of equipment by the experimenter (such as…

Use of dual-processing has been widely touted as a strategy to reduce diagnostic error in clinical medicine. However, this strategy has not been tested among medical trainees with complex diagnostic problems. We sought to determine whether dual-processing instruction could reduce diagnostic error across a spectrum of experience with trainees…

Natural language contains disfluencies and errors. Do listeners simply discard information that was clearly produced in error, or can erroneous material persist to affect subsequent processing? Two experiments explored this question using a structural priming paradigm. Speakers described dative-eliciting pictures after hearing prime sentences that…