The world’s demographics are in a state of flux. Approximately half of the world’s population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2010). Just over half of all Europeans speak a language other than the official language in a given country, and 25% of them report that they are able to hold a conversation in at least two additional languages (European Commission, 2012, p. 18). Biand multilingualism are also t...

This is the second in a series of reports concerning stuttering pre-school children enrolled in a longitudinal study; the first was Ryan (1992). Conversational samples of 20 stuttering and 20 non-stuttering pre-school children and their mothers were analysed for speaking rate, conversational speech acts, interruption, and linguistic complexity. Between-group analyses revealed few differences be...

B a r b a r a L a f f o r d In this paper, we report the results of a study that compared differences in the linguistic gains made by native English-speaking students from the United States who were studying Spanish in one of two different contexts of learning. One was a regular university classroom situation in Colorado; the other was a study abroad program in Alicante, Spain. We examined the ...

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds' interpretation of aspectual expressions such as arxi...

PURPOSE The study of auxiliary acquisition is central to work on language development and has attracted theoretical work from both nativist and constructivist approaches. This study is part of a 2-part companion set that represents a unique attempt to trace the development of auxiliary syntax by using a longitudinal elicitation methodology. The aim of the research described in this part is to t...

The present cross-sectional study investigated age and gender differences in motivational manifestations of the Big Five in a large German-speaking Internet sample (N = 19,022). Participants ranging in age from 16 to 60 years completed the Five Individual Reaction Norms Inventory (FIRNI; Denissen & Penke, 2008a), and two traditional Big Five measures. Age differences were found suggesting that ...

In the last 25 years, cognitive scientists have come to see that usingmore than one language is a natural circumstance of human experience, not an exceptional condition that produces disordered speaking or thinking (1). The revision of previously held negative views about bilingualism is largely attributable to the finding that although bilinguals appear to activate both languages when reading,...

background : pronoun error is one of the most common errors in many speech and language disorders. therefore, knowing about the development procedure of dependent possessive pronouns (as a subgroup of pronouns), leads to build an accurate profile for evaluation and treatment of many disorders. the goal of the present study was to examine the development of dependent possessive pronouns in 2.5-4...

in this study an adaptation of halliday and hasan's (1976) description of cohesion in english was applied to the spoken narratives of typical developing children. regarding the development in grammatical cohesion, narrations of 3 groups of children 4;00 to 7;00 years of age, 5 in each age group, were analyzed and compared with each other. this research applies an experimental method.to evaluate...