Artificial Grammar Learning in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate implicit learning in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by employing a visual artificial grammar learning task. Method: Thirteen children with DLD and 24 children with typical language development between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a visual artificial grammar learning task. During the training phase of the task, participants were presented with strings of shapes that followed the underlying structure of a finite grammar. During the testing phase, participants were asked to judge whether new strings were grammatical or nongrammatical. Grammatical judgment of new strings served to measure generalization of the underlying grammatical structure. Endorsement based on chunk strength, or similarity to training exemplars, served to evaluate the extent to which children relied on surface features to guide their task performance. Results: As a group, children with typical development performed better on the artificial grammar learning task, compared with children with DLD, and accepted more grammatical strings regardless of their similarity to training exemplars. Task performance in both groups was not affected by surface features. Performance of children with DLD whose test accuracy exceeded the learning threshold of 0.5 was consistent with a generalization of the underlying grammatical structure that was unaffected by surface features. Conclusions: The study found group differences in learning outcomes between children with and without DLD. Consistent with previous reports, children with typical development correctly endorsed more grammatical strings than children with DLD, suggesting a better acquisition of the grammatical structure. However, there was no evidence to suggest that children in the DLD group (learners and nonlearners) relied on surface features (i.e., familiarity to training exemplars) in their grammatical judgment. These results refute our hypothesis that children in the DLD group would show judgment based on familiarity.

Comprehension of Complex Structures by Persian-speaking Aphasics: The Role of Cognitive Load

Introduction: So far, many studies have investigated the extent and nature of the grammatical deficit in aphasia. However, to the best of our knowledge, this research is the first in the Persian language to inspect the comprehension of patients with Broca’s aphasia on diverse syntactically complex structures. Materials and Methods: To scrutinize the impact of task on aphasics’ performance, four age-, education- and gender-matched Persian-speaking patients with Broca’s aphasia were compared with their healthy matched controls regarding the two different tasks of grammatical judgment and figurine act-out task. The structures used to examine the subjects’ performance included agentive passive, subject cleft, object cleft, object relative clause, and object experiencer psychological verbs. Results: Our results which supported the trade-off hypothesis, showed that our subjects generally performed better in grammatical judgment task than in figurine act-out task (P≤0.05). Particularly in the second task, as our inner task comparison, the patients’ problems were more severe in object cleft, object experiencer, and object relative clauses: all structures whose interpretations need more cognitive load. Conclusion: Our findings put more weight on the interactive or constraint-based model of language processing.

The grammar uses of " Lao " in the poetry of Al- Sharif Al- Rada: Collection and Study: الاستعمالات النحوية لـ(لو) في شعر الشريف الرضي (359- 406): جمعاً ودراسة

This study aims to bring out some of the grammatical aspects that were included in the book of Al- Sharif Al- Radhi. It aims to study “Lao” (that is mean = if in Arabic language) in practice, by citing some verses that contain “Lao”. Following the descriptive and analytical approach. Where I put a title for the topic of the research, define the topic that was set for the research, and come to the house that was cited, document it, clarify the meanings of difficult words, while documenting this, and expressing the house, extracting the citation, and clarifying the face of citation in it, and citing the Quranic verses. To support and clarify the grammatical rule. And then I reached the most important results, which proved the following: That lao(if) is one of the condition tools that is brought to hold the causation between two sentences, that is, the link between the content of the two sentences, so that the content of the condition is a reason for the content of the answer. That (if) is used for the second abstinence, which is the recompense for the first abstention, which is the condition; This is the well- known saying of the majority of grammarians, and it was made on the tongues of the analysis. Its grammatical judgment; A conditional is probably not apocopate, unlike a few of them. It is most likely that the two sentences after it are verbs, are two verbs in past in pronunciation and meanings together, or only meaning, that the verb is present and its meaning fluctuates to past while the word remains the same. It is not followed by anything but a verb or an action, an implicit verb explained by an explicit verb after the noun. It is originally used for three basic connotations, which are: 1- The conditional is abstinence and is for comment in the past. 2- Conditional non- abstention: it is for future comment, 3- infinitive: It is synonymous: that the infinitive is in the meaning and the casting, but it is not in the subjunctive. It occurs most often in the past and present tense after: to be affectionate. For each one there is example from the poetry of Al- Sharif Al- Radhi. There are other types of (if) that many scholars have presented in grammatical extensions and linguistic; I referred to it in passing, due to the lack of citation it in the book of Al- Sharif Al- Radi. Among these meanings: wishful, provoking, and offering.

The Effect of Different Planning Conditions versus Explicit Grammar Instruction on Teenage EFL Learners’ Oral Production of a Picture Promoted Task and Grammar Gain

This study examined the effects of three task conditions on teenage EFL learners’ oral performance of a picture prompted task and their grammatical knowledge gain. To this end, 34 EFL learners were randomly assigned into three experimental groups, namely online planning, pre-planning, and explicit instruction, and one control group. Pictures were employed as prompts to implement the tasks in all groups. A Grammatical Judgment Test was used to compare students’ knowledge of simple present passive structure before and after the treatment. Learners’ oral task performance was measured in terms of Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency (CAF). The findings demonstrated significant differences among groups as for CAF measures. However, no significant differences were spotted in GJT posttest scores. The paper calls for the incorporation of diverse prompt-based planning conditions in task-oriented teaching practices in order to target learners' higher levels of oral competence.

The Effect of Oral Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback on Learners’ Knowledge of Pronoun among Iranian EFL Learners

A great number of language learners claims that they are unable to produce the foreign language accurately without any grammatical errors at the end of their language course. In this study, the impact of oral metalinguistic corrective feedback, among various types of corrective feedback, on learners’ pronoun accuracy was considered. The participants were 74 EFL learners (46 females, 28 males) studying English at Safir English language institutes in Tehran. In order to homogenize the learners, Key English Test (KET) test was given to them. 60 learners were selected for the study and 14 learners were removed. Participants were randomly divided into two groups. One group received metalinguistic feedback and the other group received explicit correction feedback. Grammatical judgment test was used as a pretest and posttest. Eight reading passages from “Select Readings” were another instrument that was used for training through jigsaw task in this study. Then t-test was run to check the significance of the mean difference between pretest and post-test of groups. The results show the priority of experimental group (which received oral metalinguistic feedback) on control group (which received explicit feedback).

Age and knowledge of morphosyntax in english as an additional language: grammatical judgment and error correction

Research on age and second language acquisition (L2A) is vast, but inconclusive. Such research has mainly been motivated by the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), which postulates that language acquisition becomes extremely difficult after the onset of puberty. Also, there is a lack of research on age and third/additional language (L3/Ln) learning. To fill this gap, this article examines differences in morphosyntactic knowledge between early and late learners of English as a L3/Ln. In this study, ‘early’ and ‘late’ learners are those participants first exposed to English as a medium of instruction (MOI) in 1st and 11th grades, respectively. Participants’ morphosyntactic knowledge was assessed based on two tasks: (a) a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and (b) an editing task. Three hundred and thirty five undergraduate and graduate students from two universities in Pakistan voluntarily participated in the research. Results of the group comparisons showed no statistically significant differences between early and late learners on the GJT; however, on the editing task, a modest but significant difference was observed between the two groups, with late learners scoring higher. This finding contradicts the predictions of the CPH.

The Acquisition of Definiteness and Specificity in English: A Case Study with Saudi-Arabic Learners of English Using an Online Task

Definiteness with Arabic learners has been explored by many researchers such as Jaensch and Sarko (2009) and Sarko (2009). The majority of previous studies have used an offline task and focused on identifying the types of errors which learners were committing. Conversely, the present study will use an online reaction time task to investigate the learners’ accuracy in judging [±definite and ±specific] in a series of sentences. The aim of the study is to ascertain the accuracy of participants in judging grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in terms of definiteness and specificity in English, and also to identify which factors have the greatest effect on this accuracy. The study will examine the process of article acquisition from the perspective of universal grammar using the following hypotheses: The Representational Deficit hypothesis (RDH) by Hawkins and Chan (1997), the Feature Reassembly hypothesis by Lardiere (2009) and the bottleneck hypothesis by Slabakova (2008, 2009, 2015). Thirty-two Saudi learners have completed a grammatical judgment task that was designed using OpenSesame to incorporate a reaction time test along with two vocabulary tests (Yes/No and Lex30) and a proficiency test. The results showed no effect on definiteness and specificity with the Saudi-Arabic learners. Moreover, the findings demonstrated that there is no difference in reaction time which could be attributed to [±definite and ±specific]. Receptive vocabulary knowledge and proficiency affected the learners’ accuracy in judging article use in English, but no such effect was found for the learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge. Additionally, L1 negative transfer has been observed in Saudi-Arabic learners of English particularly with low-level learners.

Reverse transfer in clitic collocation a study on Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese

This study focuses on reverse transfer, L2 influences on L1, with L1 as the dominant language. It investigates clitic collocation in complex verb phrases, contrasting Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Spanish. Spanish presents a stable system with proclisis to the auxiliary verb (clitic climbing) or enclisis to the main verb. BP has lost clitic climbing during the XIX century, but schooling tries to recover it, although in oral natural production, proclisis to the main verb is the preferred option. Thus, high-educated BP speakers, in principle, could still admit clitic climbing, regardless of any fluency in Spanish. By its turn, a high acceptance of clitic climbing in BP could also constitute a case of reverse transfer, if related to BP/Spanish bilinguals. In order to tease it apart, a self-paced reading experimental task with a Likert scale grammatical judgment, manipulating the position of the clitic in Portuguese sentences with high-educated monolingual BP speakers and BP/high-proficiency Spanish bilinguals was conducted. The results show that both groups accept clitic climbing in written BP sentences, but bilinguals accept it even more, and are faster in reading Portuguese sentences with clitic climbing, suggesting that Spanish clitic collocation may interfere in the processing of Portuguese sentences.

Promoting learning and unlearning through textual enhancement in a closely related L1-L2 relationship

This study investigates the differential effects of Textual Enhancement (TE) on the learning and unlearning of two syntactic properties of Spanish – the absence of the Pre-possessive Determiner Article (PPDA) and the presence of the Prepositional Accusative (PA) – which each pose specific acquisitional difficulties for Italian-speaking learners of Spanish (ISS) due to their asymmetrical relationships with corresponding L1 structures. 77 ISS were divided in two experimental groups: group A read 5 texts with TE on PA – the feature to be learned – and group B read the same 5 texts with TE on PPDA – the feature to be unlearned. The participants took a timed grammatical judgment task three times (before, five days after, and two months after the instructional treatment). The results are compared with those of Della Putta (2016), a symmetrical study to this, in which the same teaching intervention and experimental conditions were adopted with Spanish-speaking learners of Italian, whose task was to unlearn PA and to learn PPDA. The bidirectional comparison shows a similar, weak effect of TE, although in the present study, unlike in Della Putta (2016), unlearning did not seem to be more difficult than learning. These similarities and differences are discussed and theoretically motivated.