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This study examined the independent contribution of morphological awareness and orthographic awareness in reading comprehension, controlling for working memory and reading fluency in Arabic-speaking children. Participants (N = 244) from grades four and five, were classified into typical comprehenders (n = 207) and poor comprehenders (n = 37). All the participants underwent reading comprehension tasks (sentence comprehension and reading maze), orthographic awareness tasks (word choice and parsing), morphological awareness test (root morpheme awareness), working memory test (listening sentence span), word reading fluency, and word reading accuracy and fluency (reading in one minute). The results indicated that morphological awareness and orthographic awareness contributed significantly to reading comprehension (composite scores) only in the typical comprehenders group. Although morphological awareness showed significant predictive relation with reading comprehension, orthographic awareness was a stronger predictor of reading comprehension while controlling for working memory and reading fluency. The findings are discussed, and future directions for research are suggested.

The Hybrid Text Comprehension cloze (HyTeC-cloze) (Kleijn et al. Lang Test 36:553--572, 2019) is a procedure developed for the Dutch language that has been proved to be a valid and reliable measure of text comprehension beyond the sentence level. Given its advantages, including its relatively rapid construction and scoring and performance compared to standardized tests, we adapted the HyTeC-cloze procedure to create a version for the Spanish language. Therefore, this study aims at validating our adaptation. We extracted 18 texts from different school textbooks (Science, Language and History) and grades (6th, 7th, and 8th) and turned them into cloze tests, which were administered to 316 sixth to eighth graders from Chilean primary schools through an online platform. We also used a Chilean standardized reading comprehension test to evaluate the validity of our test. The correlations ranged from a low of 0.20 (for 7th grade) to a high of 0.58 (for 8th grade). Taken collectively, our data show a moderate positive correlation between both tests, which provide further evidence of cloze tests as a valid measure of reading comprehension beyond the sentence level.

Purpose: Relative clauses present a well-known processing asymmetry between object-extracted and subject-extracted dependencies across both typical and atypical populations. The present study aimed at exploring the comprehension of object and subject relative clauses as conceptualized by the Relativized Minimality framework in autistic children and in a group of age- and IQ-matched typically-developing children. The study also explored the way performance in relative clauses would be affected by the children's language and executive function skills. Method: Relative clause comprehension was tested through a sentence-picture matching task and language was tested with a receptive vocabulary task. Executive functions were assessed through backward digit recall and a Flanker test. Results: Object relative clauses were harder to parse for both groups than subject relatives, while number mismatch between the moved object Noun Phrase and the intervening subject Noun Phrase in object relatives boosted both groups' performances. Typically-developing children's performance in object relatives was predicted by both language and executive functions, while autistic children failed to use language and did not systematically draw on their executive functions in object relative clause comprehension. Conclusion: The findings suggest that relative clause processing in autism follows a normal developmental trajectory, and that difficulty with parsing object relative clauses stems from reduced language and executive functions rather than deficits in the children's morphosyntactic skills.

Background: Identifying language disorders earlier can help children receive the support needed to improve developmental outcomes and quality of life. Despite the prevalence and impacts of persistent language disorder, there are surprisingly no robust predictor tools available. This makes it difficult for researchers to recruit young children into early intervention trials, which in turn impedes advances in providing effective early interventions to children who need it. Aims: To validate externally a predictor set of six variables previously identified to be predictive of language at 11 years of age, using data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) birth cohort. Also, to examine whether additional LSAC variables arose as predictive of language outcome. Methods & Procedures: A total of 5107 children were recruited to LSAC with developmental measures collected from 0 to 3 years. At 11-12 years, children completed the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, 4th Edition, Recalling Sentences subtest. We used SuperLearner to estimate the accuracy of six previously identified parent-reported variables from ages 2-3 years in predicting low language (sentence recall score [greater than or equal to]1.5 SD below the mean) at 11-12 years. Random forests were used to identify any additional variables predictive of language outcome. Outcomes & Results: Complete data were available for 523 participants (52.20% girls), 27 (5.16%) of whom had a low language score. The six predictors yielded fair accuracy: 78% sensitivity (95% confidence interval (CI) = [58, 91]) and 71% specificity (95% CI = [67, 75]). These predictors relate to sentence complexity, vocabulary and behaviour. The random forests analysis identified similar predictors. Conclusions & Implications: We identified an ultra-short set of variables that predicts 11-12-year language outcome with 'fair' accuracy. In one of few replication studies of this scale in the field, these methods have now been conducted across two population-based cohorts, with consistent results. An imminent practical implication of these findings is using these predictors to aid recruitment into early language intervention studies. Future research can continue to refine the accuracy of early predictors to work towards earlier identification in a clinical context.

This study aimed to analyze common syntactic errors found in the argumentative essays of third-year English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Vietnam. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to obtain data in this study. The quantitative approach involved counting and calculating the frequency, percentage, and ranking of syntactic errors, while the qualitative method was adopted to explain these errors. The instrument for collecting data was argumentative essays written by 37 third-year English majors enrolling in Writing-5 at Van Lang University. Microsoft Word was used to collect and analyze syntactic errors and sentence structures, while Microsoft Excel was employed to calculate the frequency and rank of these errors and structures. The results found that the five most frequent errors in their essays were at the noun phrase and sentence levels. These errors included run-on sentences, preposition errors, article errors, sentence fragments, and pronoun errors. Through error analysis, it was indicated that the majority of errors made by students were due to the negative transfer from their first language and the literal translation. Based on the findings, language teachers and syllabus designers could use these results as guidance to design appropriate teaching methods and materials.

The study described in this article evaluates the effectiveness of methods of improving phonetic, grammatical, and syntactic skills in children with general speech underdevelopment in a bilingual environment. The method is based on a theoretical study of severe speech disorders, a structural analysis of linguistic samples, and a comparative study of the results of research by various scientists in an interdisciplinary discourse. An experimental study was carried out concerning the assessment of the effectiveness of speech therapy exercises for forming linguistic skills (phonetic-phonemic, morphological, word-formation, lexical, and syntactic) at different language levels in preschoolers with a general speech disorder in the context of bilingualism (Kazakh was considered the main language, and Russian was considered an additional language). The materials presented in this paper can be used to develop linguistic skills for various speech defects.

The purpose of this research is to describe the challenges and factors causing difficulties of deaf students in mastering writing skills at inclusive universities in Indonesia. This research is focused in Central Java province because of the more universities are considered as inclusive universities. This research was conducted in September-December 2022. The subjects in this research were selected using the purposive sampling method. Based on these limits, 35 Deaf students from six inclusive universities were obtained as respondents. The data collection techniques used questionnaires, observations, interviews, and concentrated discussions. Furthermore, the data analysis steps undertaken consisted of: (a) data analysis, (b) data revision, and (c) data verification. The results of this research concluded that the challenges experienced by students were broadly related to: (a) difficulty in mastering vocabulary, (b) understanding punctuation, and (c) difficulty if mastering complex sentences. As for more specifically related to academic text writing skills, the obstacles experienced by students including: (a) composing effective sentences, (b) developing paragraphs, (c) paraphrasing techniques, (d) writing academic texts in accordance with linguistic rules, and (e) writing bibliography. Furthermore, factors causing the occurrence of the obstacles in the mastery of academic text writing skills including: (a) unaccessible learning resources, (b) less effectively interwoven communication during lectures, and (c) different sentence structure in Sign Language with Indonesian sentence structure.

According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our understanding of adaptive processes, we recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) from L1-Mandarin-L2-English speakers while they read English sentences containing a coordination ambiguity. This ambiguity was always resolved toward a less-preferred clausal coordination in the first half of the study, and towards a noun-phrase coordination in the second half. Group-level results suggest that L2 readers adapted but at a slow rate and a coarse level. Individuals differed in that some changed their processing strategies, and some did not. These findings suggest that adaptation is not a direct function of fine-grained input distributions, and are problematic for the idea that adaptation is important for language learning.

To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to identify other words' referents. Here, we assess how accurately and efficiently 4-year-old children use sentential context to identify referents of known and novel nouns in unfamiliar-accented speech, as compared to familiar-accented speech. In a looking-while-listening task, children showed considerable success in processing unfamiliar-accented speech. Children robustly mapped known nouns produced in an unfamiliar accent to their target referents rather than novel competitors, and they used informative surrounding verbs (e.g., "You can eat the dax") to identify the referents of both known and novel nouns--although there was a processing cost for unfamiliar-accented speech in some cases. This demonstrates that 4-year-olds successfully and rapidly process unfamiliar-accented speech by recruiting the same strategies available to them in familiar-accented speech, revealing impressive flexibility in word recognition and word learning across diverse linguistic environments.

Educators and researchers have been interested in supporting sentence-level language comprehension for struggling readers, but it has been challenging to research. To investigate the properties of sentences that might be useful targets for future research in instruction and assessment, we coded several features of the items in a computer-adaptive scale of sentence comprehension. The Syntactic Knowledge Task is designed for students in Grades 3-10. We then explored how the features of the sentences were related to the item's difficulty value to determine which aspects of sentence-level language made sentences more and less challenging for students across a range of development. We found that genre, words that represent a logical connection, number of idea units, long words, and words on the Academic Word List were significantly associated with item difficulty. Implications for understanding students' sentence-level language development are discussed.

This study investigated college Chinese a second language learners' word segmentation error patterns in reading instructional-level Chinese sentences, the relationship between word segmentation errors and reading comprehension, and learners' perspectives on the role of word segmentation in reading comprehension. The results showed that the learners made five types of word segmentation errors. Four of these types moderately correlated with reading comprehension. The survey data showed that most learners considered word segmentation skills important in reading comprehension. This perception became stronger as the learning level advanced. The learners suggested that three factors hindered them from performing accurate word segmentations.

This study investigates the effects of three word-focused exercise conditions on vocabulary learning. The exercises were developed based on the involvement load hypothesis. This study also explores how individual differences (e.g. second-language English proficiency level and working memory) affect vocabulary learning outcomes. A total of 180 Chinese students were equally and randomly assigned to 3 exercise conditions (reading comprehension plus marginal glosses, reading plus gap-fill and reading plus sentence writing). The Vocabulary Knowledge Scale was adapted to measure pre- and post-test vocabulary gains. An n-back task was developed to assess learners' working memory capacity. Results showed that the sentence-writing group yielded the best performance in vocabulary learning, followed by the gap-fill group and finally the reading-comprehension group. General linear model results revealed that learners' English proficiency level and working memory significantly predicted their vocabulary gains. This study expands on prior research by exploring learner-related factors in vocabulary learning. Relevant implications are discussed based on the findings.

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they performed above chance in all other scenarios, including plural third-person subjects and sentences with overt full DP subjects. This is reminiscent of the results of Pérez-Leroux for Spanish. In experiment 2, with the same design but involving numeral distractors, children's performance was above chance level across all conditions from age 3 to 4. Then, in experiment 3, we moved to a younger age range with the help of eye-tracking techniques. The findings revealed that infants at 22 months had the ability to parse subject--verb agreement in sentences with third-person null subjects, and at 19 months there was evidence of parsing for third-person plural null subjects. These findings are inconsistent with the perception of children grappling with syntactic agreement computation. We argue that instances of underperformance in subject--verb agreement parsing identified in the literature often stem from task-related and pragmatic issues rather than core syntactic delay. If so, the putative asymmetry between early production of verbal inflection and late comprehension disappears; rather, the results suggest early establishment of matching operations and mastery of language-specific agreement properties before production starts.

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the linguistic content of the Spanish HINT and the Spanish AzBio sentence tests. The results revealed that the Spanish AzBio is linguistically more complex as compared with the Spanish HINT in terms of sentence length, complexity, and grammatical structure.

Primary school students rely heavily on textbooks for instruction. Using the variety of textbooks, a description of the theme textbooks' linguistic quality is conspicuously absent, particularly for students in the fifth grade. Language fit for students' growth, communicative language, and coherence and cohesiveness were all included in this study's analysis of textbooks' language quality. Qualitative content analysis was used in this study's methodology. All texts from the heat and transfer-themed of fifth-grade textbooks published by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, Yudhistira, and Erlangga publishers were included in the study. Documentation was utilized to collect the data. Sample, record, reduce, infer, and narrate were all data analysis approaches used. The findings of this research indicated that the three publishers' textbooks had excellent language quality in terms of language compatibility for students' growth and the communicative language issued by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture and Erlangga was wonderful, but Yudhistira was awful. There were a lot of solid points made in the Ministry of Education and Culture's publications. Both Yudhistira and Erlangga performed admirably. The quality of textbook language was found to be satisfactory in this study.

With the proliferation of corpora, various syntactic analysis methodologies have been developed. However, syntactic analysis of Chinese sentences demands a theory that focuses more on word order and the interaction between content and function words, which is satisfied by pattern grammar theory. This study investigates the effectiveness of pattern grammar theory in the analysis of Chinese sentence structure and explores the linguistic characteristics of official documents by establishing a description system for structural complexity in Chinese. Statistical methods such as skewness, kurtosis, and correlation analyses were employed to evaluate the system's performance. The findings confirm the effectiveness of pattern grammar in analyzing Chinese sentence structure by showing that it can accurately reflect the unique properties of Chinese official documents, such as the preference for fixed collocations, declarative sentences, and flat structures. Based on the above findings, this study provides a semantically compatible and innovative theoretical system for analyzing Chinese sentence structures.

Purpose: Despite the clinical utility of sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment in autism, little is known about the extent to which these tasks are sensitive to potential language variation. One promising method is strategic scoring, which has good clinical utility for identifying language impairment in nonautistic school-age children across variants of English. This report applies strategic scoring to analyze sentence repetition and sentence production in autistic adolescents and adults. Method: Thirty-one diverse autistic adolescents and adults with language impairment (ALI; n = 15) and without language impairment (ASD; n = 16) completed the Formulated Sentences and Recalling Sentences subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals--Fifth Edition. Descriptive analyses and regression evaluated effects of scoring condition, group, and scoring condition by group on outcomes, as well as group differences in finiteness marking across utterances and morphosyntactic structures. Results: Strategic and unmodified item-level scores were essentially constant on both subtests and significantly lower in the ALI than the ASD group. Only group predicted item-level scores. Group differences were limited to: percent grammatical utterances on Formulated Sentences and percent production of overt structures combined on Sentence Repetition (ALI < ASD). Discussion: Findings support the feasibility of strategic scoring for sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment and indicate that potential language variation in finiteness marking did not confound outcomes in this sample. To better understand the clinical utility of strategic scoring, replication with a larger sample varying in age and comparisons with dialect-sensitive measures are needed.

Purpose: This systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis examines the accuracy of sentence repetition (SR) tasks in distinguishing between typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). It explores variation in the way that SR tasks are administered and/or evaluated and examines whether variability in the reported ability of SR to detect DLD is related to these differences. Method: Four databases were searched to identify studies that had used an SR task on groups of monolingual children with DLD and TD children. Searches produced 3,459 articles, of which, after screening, 66 were included in the systematic review. A multilevel meta-analysis was then conducted using 46 of these studies. Multiple preregistered subgroup analyses were conducted in order to explore the sources of heterogeneity. Results: The systematic review found a great deal of methodological variation, with studies spanning 19 languages, 39 SR tasks, and four main methods of production scoring. There was also variation in study design, with different sampling (clinical and population sampling) and matching (age and language matching) methods. The overall meta-analysis found that, on average, TD children outperformed children with DLD on the SR tasks by 2.08 SDs. Subgroup analyses found that effect size only varied as a function of the matching method and language of the task. Conclusions: Our results indicate that SR tasks can distinguish children with DLD from both age- and language-matched samples of TD children. The usefulness of SR appears robust to most kinds of task and study variation.

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.g., "The hospital [that was] requested by the doctor…"). If comprehenders have a bias to interpret metonyms in subject position as agents (Fishbein & Harris, 2014), they should initially access the figurative (institutional) sense of the metonym. This interpretation is rendered incorrect at the disambiguating by-phrase, which should lead to reanalysis (i.e., garden-path effects). In Experiment 1, larger garden-path effects were observed for metonyms compared to inanimate control nouns that did not have a figurative sense. In Experiment 2, garden-path effects were equivalent for metonyms and animate sentence subjects. In addition, there was some evidence that readers exhibited initial difficulty at the verb (e.g., "requested") when it immediately followed the metonym compared to the inanimate control nouns in Experiment 1. Overall, the results suggest that the subject-as-agent heuristic is a powerful cue during sentence processing, which can prompt the comprehender to access a figurative interpretation of a metonym.

Can brief training on novel grammatical morphemes influence visual processing of nonlinguistic stimuli? If so, how deep is this effect? Here, an experimental group learned two novel morphemes highlighting the familiar concept of transitivity in sentences; a control group was exposed to the same input but with the novel morphemes used interchangeably. Subsequently, both groups performed two visual oddball tasks with nonlinguistic motion events. In the first (attentional) oddball task, relative to the control group, the experimental group showed decreased attention (P300) to infrequent changes in the morpheme-irrelevant dimension (shape) but not the morpheme-relevant dimension (motion transitivity); in the second (preattentive) oddball task, they showed enhanced preattentive responses (N1/visual mismatch negativity) to infrequent changes in motion transitivity but not shape. Our findings show that increasing attention to preexisting concepts in sentences through brief training on novel grammatical morphemes can influence both attentional and preattentive visual processing.

Headsprout Early Reading is a computer-based program designed on behavioral principles to enhance the basic skills that underpin the initial development of reading. In a within and between groups design, and using primary schools within Northern Ireland that had a currently high proportion of disadvantaged pupils, children who were behind their peers in progress with reading were randomly allocated to an intervention group (n = 79), where the target was to work through 80 reading training episodes within a school year, or a teaching as usual group (n = 44). Reading skills were assessed in all children before, at the midpoint, and after the intervention using a flashcard-based phonics identification test with three levels of difficulty, and before and after intervention using a standardized reading assessment, which generated a sentence reading age and a phonics reading age. Both groups showed increased scores on all measures over the 6 months of the study, but the intervention group showed markedly greater improvement. Importantly, the mean scores on sentence reading age and phonics reading age for the intervention group increased by over 17 months and 12.1 months, respectively, as opposed to 7.6 months and 7.8 months with the control group. These findings also validated the use of the flashcard-based phonics identification test with this population. This study indicates that widespread use of Headsprout Early Reading in mainstream education could be highly effective.

Negation is usually considered as a linguistic operator reversing the truth value of a proposition. However, there are various ways to express negation in a multimodal manner. It still remains an unresolved issue whether nonverbal expressions of negation can influence linguistic negation comprehension. Based on extensive evidence demonstrating that language comprehenders are able to instantly integrate extralinguistic information such as a speaker's identity, we expected that nonverbal cues of negation and affirmation might similarly affect sentence comprehension. In three preregistered experiments, we examined how far nonverbal markers of negation and affirmation--specifically, the so-called "not face" (see Benitez-Quiroz et al., 2016) and red or green color (see Dudschig et al., 2023)--interact with comprehending negation and affirmation at the sentential level. Participants were presented with photos ("not face" vs. positive control; Experiments 1 and 2) or color patches (red vs. green; Experiment 3). They then read negated and affirmative sentences in a self-paced manner or judged the sensibility of negated and affirmative sentences (e.g., "No, I do not want to sing" vs. "Yes, I would like to buy a sofa"). Both frequentist statistics and Bayes factors resulting from linear mixed-effects analyses showed that processing times for negated and affirmative sentences were not significantly modulated by the nonverbal features under investigation. This indicates that their influence might not extend to sentential negation or affirmation comprehension.

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) tend to interpret noncanonical sentences like passives using event probability (EP) information regardless of structure (e.g., by interpreting "The dog was chased by the squirrel" as "The dog chased the squirrel"). Verbs are a major source of EP information in adults and children with typical development (TD), who know that "chase" implies an unequal relationship among participants. Individuals with DLD have poor verb knowledge and verb-based sentence processing. Yet, they also appear to rely more on EP information than their peers. This paradox raises two questions: (a) How do children with DLD use verb-based EP information alongside other information in online passive sentence interpretation? (b) How does verb vocabulary knowledge support EP information use? Method: We created novel EP biases by showing animations of agents with consistent action tendencies (e.g., clumsy vs. helpful actions). We then used eye tracking to examine how this EP information was used during online passive sentence processing. Participants were 4- to 5-year-old children with DLD (n = 20) and same-age peers with TD (n = 20). Results: In Experiment 1, children with DLD quickly integrated verb-based EP information with morphosyntax close to the verb but failed to do so with distant morphosyntax. In Experiment 2, the quality of children's sentence-specific verb vocabulary knowledge was positively associated with the use of EP information in both groups. Conclusion: Depending on the morphosyntactic context, children with DLD and TD used EP information differently, but verb vocabulary knowledge aided its use.

Assessment is viewed as an important means to understand learners' performance in the learning process. A good assessment method is based on high-quality examination questions. However, generating high-quality examination questions manually by teachers is a time-consuming task, and it is not easy for students to obtain question banks. To solve this issue, this study proposes an automatic high-quality question generation system based on natural language processing and Topic Model. A two-stage test-question generation method (sentence selection and neural question generation) is proposed in this study. We apply multisource teaching materials to select declarative sentences, and then a neural question generation model called topic-embedding question generation (TE-QG) is employed to generate high-quality examination questions. This model is based on attention and the pointer-generator mechanism. The experimental results show that the sentence selection method can select sentences that meet the key points of the course, and the performance of the TE-QG model outperforms those of existing NQG models.

Background: Early intervention is recommended for pre-school children with low language. However, few robustly evaluated language interventions for young children exist. Furthermore, in many interventions the theoretical underpinnings are underspecified and the 'active ingredients' of the interventions not tested. This paper presents a quasi-experimental study to test the efficacy and examine the active ingredients of Building Early Sentences Therapy (BEST): an intervention based on usage-based theory designed to support young children to understand and produce two-, three- and four-clause element sentences. BEST manipulates the input children hear to support them to harness the cognitive mechanisms hypothesized in usage-based theories to promote the development of abstract linguistic representations. One such input manipulation is the use of signing alongside verbal input signalling both content and morphology of target sentences. Aims: To examine whether (1) BEST is more efficacious than treatment as usual (TAU); and (2) signing of content and morphology is an active ingredient of the intervention. Methods & Procedures: A quasi-experimental study recruited children aged 3;5-4;5 years from 13 schools. Schools were assigned to receive either BEST with sign, BEST without sign or TAU. The TAU group received their usual classroom provision. Across arms schools were matched with respect to classroom oral language environment and indices of deprivation. Participants were 48 children (28 boys) with expressive and/or receptive language abilities = 16th centile measured using the New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (NRDLS). Outcomes gathered by researchers blind to treatment arm were NRDLS production and comprehension standard scores and measures of production of targeted sentence structures. Outcomes & Results: Primary outcomes indicate that BEST with sign was significantly more efficacious than TAU with respect to NRDLS production standard score, but not comprehension. The advantage for production was maintained at follow-up. BEST without sign was significantly more efficacious than TAU on measures of targeted vocabulary, sentence structure and morphology. The results from this quasi-experimental study provide evidence for the efficacy of a usage-based intervention on expressive language outcomes for preschool children with low language abilities. There is also evidence to support the inclusion of sign as an active ingredient, and so efforts to train interventionists in its use are worthwhile. Conclusions & Implications: Patterns of findings across outcomes suggest signing of content and morphology may support the development of abstract linguistic representations and accelerate language learning. Given these positive results and the scale of this study, a fully powered randomized controlled trial is warranted.

The involvement load hypothesis (ILH), which predicts the lexical learning potential of tasks, assumes that writing sentences (SW) and compositions (CW) using novel target words (TWs) lead to similar lexical gains. However, research on the issue is scarce and contradictory. One possibility is that the higher cognitive load of CW hinders learning relative to SW. To verify the learning potential of SW and CW, we selected 20 English academic TWs and conducted a pretest-posttest quasi-experiment with Polish advanced learners of English. First, all participants wrote a control essay (without TWs), then SW participants wrote sentences and CW participants wrote two essays, each with 10 TWs. Generalized linear mixed models revealed higher gains in breadth and depth of knowledge for SW than for CW, which contradicts the predictions of the ILH. Furthermore, to detect signs of cognitive load, we derived three task-based performance measurements from the compositions: holistic scores, number of errors, and words per minute. The measurements found that the control essay and essays with TWs were of similar quality (holistic scores), but that the control essay was written faster and with fewer errors than the other two. Concluding, using TWs in essays probably increased learners' cognitive load, slowing down their writing, generating more errors, and ultimately, decreasing learning of the TWs.

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm to examine the processing of sentences with "only" in English by native speakers of English and advanced Dutch learners of English. Successful processing of sentences with "only" requires rapid integration of prosodic information with semantic and syntactic information. We found that L2 listeners showed native-like processing of the acoustics of contrastive pitch accents when adjacent to "only." However, they needed more cues than L1 listeners to perform native-like in forming expectations for focus placement. Our results thus provide first ERP-based evidence for difficulty in the integration of information for focus expectation in difficult L2 constructs.

While writing has evolved away from the conventional method of using pens and paper in favor of digital tools (Li et al., 2019), English teachers continue to face difficulties in teaching writing. This study shows how mind-mapping and the program, Writeabout, can be merged for online writing classes in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms. It reports on a classroom-based research with a qualitative research design which includes class observations and essay analysis of first-year undergraduate students enrolled in the Railway Mechanical Technology program in Indonesia during the academic year 2020/2021. The analysis of students' essays via TOEIC-adopted writing criteria showed that the students lacked competence in vocabulary (range: 2-5), grammar (range: 2-5), and sentence quality (range: 2-5). However, their text organization skills were a bit higher (range: 3-7), which was likely due to the course instructions incorporation of mind-mapping techniques. The findings revealed that incorporating the mind-mapping technique and the Writeabout application into online writing lessons can have a positive effect on students' writing.

This study aims to investigate the types and functions of expressions of fear realized in the form of sentences. With a special context in horror movies, the researcher attempted to reveal the types and functions of fear expressions such as directive, commissive, expressive, assertive, and declarative. This research focuses on the subtitles of the Stranger Things season 1 series with 8 episodes, one of the best-selling serial films on the Netflix application. As research aids, the researcher used the Aegisub application and live transcript to ensure the accuracy of speech data. Findings suggest the dominance of the use of directive speech acts as a form of expression of fear. Then, commanding speech is the function of most utterances found as an expression of fear. This study concludes that expressions of fear realized in sentences do not only exist in expressive speech acts but also in other speech acts such as directive, assertive and commissive.

This study revisits and extends McManus and Marsden (2019a) to better understand "how" and "why" providing additional explicit information (EI) about learners' first language (L1) alongside EI and comprehension practice in the second language (L2) improved the accuracy, speed, and stability of L2 comprehension of the French "Imparfait," a functionally complex and late-acquired target feature. Building on previous L2 research that has provided instruction about L1 without analyzing L1 knowledge/use, the current study examines learners' item-by-item comprehension of L1 sentences that was completed during the L2 instruction to better understand the learning mechanisms at play in McManus and Marsden's (2019a) findings. Two groups of English-speaking learners (L2+L1, L2+L1prac; N = 36) received the same EI about aspect in French, followed by comprehension practice of French and English sentences. The L2+L1 group received additional EI about aspect in English. Results showed no impact of the instruction on L1 accuracy in either group, but the speed of L1 comprehension changed over time in the L2+L1 group. It is argued that the L2+L1 instruction directed attention to and clarified crosslinguistic differences in how L2 and L1 express the same meanings, which rendered the L2 practice more effective for noticing "Imparfait" and developing appropriate strategies for processing L2 forms. Implications for theory-building and instructional design are discussed.

The role of context in cloze tests has long been seen as both a benefit as well as a complication in their usefulness as a measure of second language comprehension (Brown, 2013). Passage cohesion, in particular, would seem to have a relevant and important effect on the degree to which cloze items function and the interpretability of performances (Brown, 1983; Dastjerdi & Talebinezhad, 2006; Oller & Jonz, 1994). With recent evidence showing that cloze items can require examinees to access information at both the sentence and passage level (Trace, 2020), it's worthwhile to now look back and examine the relationship between aspects of passage cohesion--referential cohesion, semantic overlap, and incidence of conjunctives--and item difficulty by classification. The current study draws upon a large pool of cloze test passages and items (k = 377) originally used by Brown (1993) along with automated text analysis of cohesion ("Coh-Metrix," McNamara et al., 2014) to examine the impact of passage cohesion on item function. Correlations, factor analysis, and linear regression point to clear though minimal differences for both sentential and intersentential items as they relate to aspects of passage cohesion, the results of which may inform future test design and interpretation of cloze performance.

Generative AIs such as Google Bard are known to be equipped with techniques and grammatical principles of human language based on a large corpus of text and code that allow them to generate natural-sounding language, and also identify and correct grammatical errors in human-written texts. Still, they are not perfect language generators, and this paper reports some interesting errors produced by Google Bard regarding interpretation of English plain and reflexive pronouns. Although Google Bard is clearly well aware of how to locate the antecedents for English pronouns, it consistently produces seemingly random interpretation errors when the prompt asks it to create a short story based on test sentences containing a plain or a reflexive pronoun. Since it is quite evident that Google Bard does not have an inborn system of grammatical principles including the binding principles, which are used to account for how human beings deal with pronoun interpretation, other approaches to processing human language need to be considered to explain Google Bard's errors and the underlying mechanisms leading up to the errors. Thus, a processing account based on the Emergentist approach (O'Grady, 2005) and the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach model (Sperlich, 2020) is adopted, and the two separate levels of processing, that is, sentence processing and pragmatic processing, are introduced to account for Google Bard's errors and the human language interpretation mechanism that might be underlying. These findings can not only shed light on how generative AIs might be analyzing human language but also contribute to our better understanding of human language and related theories.

Purpose: This study examined speech changes induced by deep-brain stimulation (DBS) in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) using a set of auditory-perceptual and acoustic measures. Method: Speech recordings from nine speakers with PD and DBS were compared between DBS-On and DBS-Off conditions using auditory-perceptual and acoustic analyses. Auditory-perceptual ratings included voice quality, articulation precision, prosody, speech intelligibility, and listening effort obtained from 44 listeners. Acoustic measures were made for voicing proportion, second formant frequency slope, vowel dispersion, articulation rate, and range of fundamental frequency and intensity. Results: No significant changes were found between DBS-On and DBS-Off for the five perceptual ratings. Four of six acoustic measures revealed significant differences between the two conditions. While articulation rate and acoustic vowel dispersion increased, voicing proportion and intensity range decreased from the DBS-Off to DBS-On condition. However, a visual examination of the data indicated that the statistical significance was mostly driven by a small number of participants, while the majority did not show a consistent pattern of such changes. Conclusions: Our data, in general, indicate no-to-minimal changes in speech production ensued from DBS stimulation. The findings are discussed with a focus on large interspeaker variability in PD in terms of their speech characteristics and the potential effects of DBS on speech.

It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax-discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information structure tend to manifest more strongly in noncanonical than in canonical structures, we tested whether L2 learners of Korean show sensitivity to such constraints during online processing. In a story-continuation task, both native and nonnative speaker groups showed a strong preference for producing canonical dative patterns, indicating their comparable knowledge of the canonical status of Korean dative sentences. In a self-paced reading task, both groups spent longer reading times when the word order of dative sentences did not follow given-new information structure, but only for the noncanonical and not the canonical structure. These results suggest that L2 processing of dative structures at the syntax-discourse interface relies on the same parsing architecture that guides native-speaker processing.

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean-L2-English speakers' processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like "Some/All elephants have trunks and ears." Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e. slower reading) to underinformative scalar sentences relative to non-scalar sentences, but second language (L2) speakers did not. These results are interpreted in support of the Relevance Theory claim that scalar implicature generation is modulated by contextual and individual factors, in particular by the language condition, that is, whether sentences are presented in L1-English versus L2-English.

Purpose: In this study, we examined the utility of vowel intelligibility testing for assessing the impact of dysarthria on speech characteristics in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We tested the sensitivity and specificity of overall vowel identification, as well as that of vowel-specific identification, to dysarthria presence and severity. We additionally examined the relationship between vowel intelligibility and sentence intelligibility. Method: Twenty-three people with ALS and 22 age- and sex-matched control speakers produced sentences from the Speech Intelligibility Test (SIT), as well as 10 American English monophthongs in /h/--vowel--/d/ words for the vowel intelligibility test (VIT). Data for SIT and VIT scores came from 135 listeners. Diagnostic accuracy of VIT measures was evaluated using the area under the curve of receiver operator characteristics. We then examined differences between control speakers, speakers with mild dysarthria, and speakers with severe dysarthria in their relationship between SIT and VIT scores. Results: The results suggest that the overall vowel intelligibility score showed high sensitivity and specificity in differentiating between speakers with and without dysarthria, even those with milder symptoms. In addition, single-vowel identification scores showed at least acceptable group differentiation between the mild and severe dysarthria groups, though fewer single vowels were acceptable discriminators between the control group and the group with mild dysarthria. Identification accuracy of /I/ in particular showed excellent discrimination across all groups. Examination of the relationship between SIT and VIT scores suggests a severity-specific relationship. Speakers with SIT scores above 70% generally had higher SIT than VIT scores, whereas speakers with SIT below 70% generally had higher VIT than SIT scores. Discussion: Vowel intelligibility testing can detect speech impairments in speakers with mild dysarthria and residual articulatory function in speakers with severe dysarthria. Vowel intelligibility testing may, therefore, be a useful addition to intelligibility testing for individuals with dysarthria.

Background: Reading comprehension is an interactive process. Yet, instructional needs are usually identified with isolated componential tests. This study examined whether a dynamic approach, in which componential abilities are measured within the same text and global text comprehension is facilitated via feedback, can help in understanding variation in children's reading comprehension. Objectives: With a pretest-posttest control group design, componential abilities before and after feedback were related to growth in global text comprehension within the same text. Methods: At pretest, third to fifth graders read 30 short texts, each followed by one global text comprehension question. This was repeated at posttest, but additional questions were asked with feedback prior to each global text comprehension question. The vocabulary group received two vocabulary questions with feedback (n = 97). The vocabulary plus integration group received two vocabulary questions and one sentence-integration question with feedback (n = 98). The control group (n = 98) only answered the global text comprehension questions. Results and Conclusion: Participants in the experimental conditions who needed feedback (i.e., lower-skilled) experienced a decrease in global text comprehension, whereas this was not found for the control group and participants in the experimental groups who did not need feedback (i.e., higher-skilled). There was also less decrease among those lower-skilled participants who had profited from the feedback. Implications: It is concluded from explorative analyses that not feedback but the overall design caused the decrease. Conceptually, the dynamic approach is worth further research.

Practicing pronunciation through language learning systems incorporating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has been effective in helping improve foreign language pronunciation. One of the ASR affordances is that it can provide immediate, personalized feedback on learners' pronunciation. We investigated the effects of two ASR-based language learning systems, "I Love Indonesia" (ILI) and "NovoLearning" (NOVO), on learners' word-level and sentence-level pronunciation. ILI offers global corrective feedback, while NOVO is equipped with corrective feedback on phonetic details. 117 Indonesian high school students participated in a five-week-long experiment; 52 students used ILI and 65 NOVO. Three pronunciation measures were calculated on a pre and post reading test: phonetic edit distances plus accentedness and comprehensibility ratings. Results indicate significant improvements in learners' pronunciation, confirming that both systems are promising learning tools, with NOVO leading to more progress. Future studies should examine the long-term effects of ASR-based global and phonetic feedback on learners' pronunciation quality.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to pilot the efficacy of rapid syllable transition (ReST) treatment when provided once per week for a 50-min treatment session for 12 weeks with five children with childhood apraxia of speech. Of central importance was the children's retention and generalization of gains from treatment as indicators of speech motor learning. Method: A multiple-baseline across-participant design was employed to investigate (a) treatment effect on the 20 treated pseudowords, (b) generalization to 40 untreated real words and 10 untreated polysyllabic word sentences, and (c) maintenance of any treatment and generalization goals to up to 4 months posttreatment. To investigate any difference between in-session performance and retention, a comparison was made between data collected during treatment and probe sessions. Results: Treatment data collected during therapy showed all children improving across their 12 treatment sessions. Three of the five children showed a treatment effect on treated pseudowords in the probe sessions, but only one child showed generalization to untreated real words, and no children showed generalization to sentences. Conclusions: ReST treatment delivered at a dose frequency of once per week was efficacious for only one of the five children. In-session treatment data were not a reliable indicator of children's learning. One session per week of ReST therapy is therefore not recommended.

We examined the impact of prospective information on the processing of information occurring within the present timeline of narrative stories. Participants read target sentences that were consistent with events occurring within a protagonist's present timeline but inconsistent with events in the protagonist's future. When prospective information was readily available and/or received strong contextual support, processing difficulties were immediate, (i.e. they occurred on the target sentence). When the prospective information was backgrounded and/or not supported with additional contextual information, processing disruptions were delayed until the spillover sentence. Results are discussed within memory-based theories, specifically the RI-Val model.

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18 immigrants ranging in age from 2;11 to 14;2 (years;months), all within their first year in Montreal at Time 1, enrolled in a French school or day care, and from a Mandarin first language background. Participants were tested again a year later. Measures included receptive and expressive French vocabulary tests and conversational language samples analyzed using traditional measures of mean length of utterance (MLU) and morphological accuracy as well as novel measures of semantic and sentence-level patterns. Results: Performance was relatively high already at Time 1 and increased significantly at Time 2 in both vocabulary and MLU. At Time 2, vocabulary scores were below normative values, whereas MLU was within expected values relative to monolingual and simultaneous bilinguals for the majority of the participants. However, higher MLUs were accompanied by more instances of both semantic errors and creative semantic strategies. French performance was strongly related to AoE; with amount of exposure equivalent, older participants outperformed the younger ones on MLU and vocabulary. Semantic errors and creative uses were strongly predicted by AoE; however, morphological accuracy and number of agrammatical utterances were not. Conclusions: This initial period of French learning involved a rapid growth spurt for most of the participants. We argue that the pattern observed, particularly among the older children, constitutes an early stage of L2 learning characterized by long utterances that are also frequently hard to understand as speakers encounter challenges and use creative strategies in their attempt to convey meaning. Comparison with normative reference bases for monolinguals and bilinguals with greater cumulative L2 exposure who have similar MLUs should be done with much caution during this early period.

The study presents an exploration of how interpersonal relationships are created in a speech text. It investigated former President Muhammadu Buhari's Independence Day speech using mood structural analysis. The analysis aimed to explore the power of using mood structure in addressing Nigerians about the President's programs and policies during the 61st Independence Anniversary. The study adopted Halliday's systemic functional grammatical framework. The data were broken into clauses and mood structures. The analysis revealed that there were twelve declarative and four imperative sentences, respectively. The findings showed that the former President employed more declarative sentences than other forms of mood to demonstrate his close connection with his audience. He deliberately used fewer imperative sentences and other mood forms to indicate the power dynamics with his audience. The mood structural analysis of former President Buhari's Independence speech was characterized by well-selected linguistic structures aimed at conveying the policies and programs of his administration over time. It also illustrates how linguistic structures build interpersonal relationships in a speech text.

Lexical bundles are recurrent multiword combinations and often function as discourse building blocks. Lexical bundles have been analysed in university students' writing to detect linguistic errors, measure writing competence, and investigate the divergence between L1 and L2 writing. Few studies, however, have focused on the high-stakes genre of PhD thesis and investigated the bundle productions of the same genre within the same level and discipline. This paper compares sentence initial lexical bundles in the corpora of English theses written by Chinese and New Zealand PhD students in the discipline of General and Applied Linguistics. Forty-six bundles from a Chinese corpus and forty-two bundles from a New Zealand corpus were generated. Among them, 94% of sentence initial bundles were identified as metadiscursive bundles. Chinese and New Zealand doctoral students showed considerably different preferences in their bundle selection. The paper examines the possible impact of these preferences and suggests there is a need to extend the metadiscourse knowledge of doctoral students in terms of lexical bundles.

This study investigates how L1-Korean L2-English learners perform with regard to articles in both explicit and implicit tasks. It also examines the role of L1-transfer from Korean demonstratives to English definites in L2 article production. 21 native English speakers and 27 adult intermediate L1-Korean L2-English learners were tested. The participants completed an elicited imitation task (EIT, implicit) and a forced-choice task (FCT, explicit). In the EIT, participants repeated sentences with and without articles, while stating whether the sentence matched the picture. In the FCT, participants chose the correct article for each item. The same sentences were used in both tasks. The results showed that in the FCT, learners were target-like in anaphoric contexts, supplying "the," but very frequently overused "a" in non-anaphoric (bridging) contexts, suggesting that they equate definiteness with previous-mention. In the EIT, learners were less target-like than native speakers, yet the patterns of the two groups were similar. We consider possible explanations for the different results obtained in the two tasks.

Purpose: This study aims to examine whether binocular vision plays a facilitating or impeding role in lexical processing during sentence reading in Chinese. Method: Adopting the revised boundary paradigm, we orthogonally manipulated the parafoveal and foveal viewing conditions (monocular vs. binocular) of target words (high- vs. low-frequency) within sentences. Forty participants (30 females, mean age = 19.9 years) were recruited to read these sentences and their eye movements were monitored. Results: Through directly comparing the eye movement measures in different viewing conditions, the results indicated that compared with monocular viewing, binocular viewing resulted in shorter fixation durations, thereby facilitating lexical processing. Critically, in addition to the higher information encoding speed toward the currently fixated word in the fovea, the more efficient preprocessing of the upcoming text to the right of fixation in the parafovea may also contribute to the superiority of binocular vision over monocular. Conclusion: Our findings provide the first evidence to support the binocular advantages in Chinese reading, which reveals that high-quality visual input from binocular vision plays a vital role in fluent and efficient written text reading.