Typical Language Research Articles

模因论下网络暴力语言生成机制及特征研究

As an emerging language variant, researchers have made many efforts from different perspectives to address online violence language. Dawkins believes that human society is full of memes, and everything people learn is memes. Memetics, as a new theory, aims to explain the relationship between language and culture. Undoubtedly, memetics provides a new perspective for linguistics, and many scholars have been studying this theory for a long time. At the same time, we also noticed that previous research has left a lot of research space for this typical theory. Otherwise, language is constantly changing. Therefore, the variation and development of human language directly affect its evolution. Memetics provides a new perspective for analyzing online language. On the other hand, from the perspective of research on language memes, there is insufficient attention paid to the dynamic generation of language memes and a lack of a systematic and comprehensive conceptual framework for meme language. Network language is a product of the information age background and a typical language variant. Therefore, analyzing its complex generation and evolution process is of great significance for the development of language. This article is based on meme theory and focuses on language variants of online violence. Mainly studying the language variants of online violence used by young Chinese netizens. Based on the definition of online violence language, in order to better analyze the variants of online violence language, the author screened some typical online violence events from 2011 to 2021. Based on the fact that there are a large number of language variants of online violence and popular internet slang, the author has built a corpus to better analyze this language variant. All texts are collected from some influential websites, such as Weibo, QQ, WeChat, Tiktok, etc. In addition, some data is collected from real-world communication. The collected language variants of online violence are representative and widely disseminated.

The role of working memory in the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences in children with and without developmental language disorder: A literature review

Working memory (WΜ) components are investigated as correlates of complex sentence comprehension (cSC) in children, under the consideration of WM as a cognitive system of limited capacity. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between WM components and cSC in children of typical language development (TLD) as well as in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), by systematically reviewing relevant studies. First, different tasks that are used to assess three distinct WM components are presented and task purity considerations on each of them are taken into account. Second, syntactically complex sentence types that are considered to constrain the already limited resources of WM are presented. Then, the systematic methods of the PRISMA-P protocol are followed. Based on them, six databases were thoroughly searched. After an initial screening stage and a final evaluation stage, twenty-eight studies were found to meet the inclusion criteria. Narrative synthesis was performed on the included studies. In TLD children, results on the role of verbal short-term memory (vST) and verbal working memory (vWM) in cSC are inconclusive, either supporting or questioning the capacity-limit approach. In DLD children, verbal working memory (vWM) has an important effect on cSC, rather than verbal short-term memory (vSTM). This suggests that a processing-execution component is important in DLD children’s cSC. For both children groups, a component serving as an interface between vSTM/vWM and long-term memory (vSTM/vWM-LTM) seems to play an important role; however, it is greatly understudied. Based on the results, future research directions and educational implications are suggested.

Lexical skills in children with and without autism in the context of Arabic diglossia: Evidence from vocabulary and narrative tasks

ABSTRACT Arabic is characterized by diglossia, which involves the use of two language varieties within a single speech community: Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday speech and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for formal speech and reading/writing. Earlier research suggests that some Arabic-speaking children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might favor MSA over SpA in informal settings, unlike those with Typical Language Development (TLD). Research on typical and atypical lexical abilities within the diglossic context of Arabic is limited. This study investigated the manifestation of diglossia in the lexical skills of Palestinian-Arabic speaking children with and without ASD. A total of 57 Palestinian-Arabic speaking children aged 4-11 were evaluated, comprising three groups: TLD, ASD with language Impairment (LI) (ASD+LI), and ASD with normal language skills (ASD+NL). Two vocabulary tasks were used: comprehension and production of nouns and verbs that manipulated the lexico-phonological distance between SpA and MSA. Moreover, a LITMUS-MAIN narrative production task in SpA was administered to all children. The vocabulary comprehension and production tasks were coded for accuracy of response. The production tasks (vocabulary and narrative) were also coded using a special coding rubric according to which all words used were categorized as either SpA or MSA. No differences emerged between the TLD and ASD+NL groups in any vocabulary measure, yet lower scores were observed in the ASD+LI group. In production tasks, all groups utilized SpA more than MSA. Nonetheless, some children with ASD overused MSA lexis. These findings highlight the heterogeneity of lexical skills among children with ASD. The results further underscore the role of diglossia in Arabic in lexical abilities in autism, and thus call for thorough language assessment procedures across different domains.

THE HOCKEY COLLECTIVE IDENTITY: COGNITIVE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (Verbal and Multimodal Aspects)

The associative and interpretative analysis of speech units is a traditional practice in discourse analysis that is involved in discourse studies to demonstrate how participants of communication mutually agree on the meaning they structure during the discourse. The controlled experiments are held under conditions that are relatively unusual for the natural discourse practice as in the real-time discourse the process of meaning structuring and reconstruction is due to deep involvement in the situational context. That is why the purpose of our study was to complete the experiment’s results with the mental models or situation models reflecting the categories of thinking during structuring hockey discourse in order to develop the idea of collective hockey identity that arises from the discourse because of some typical discourse structures and typical language behaviour in the process of discourse. The purpose of the research enabled several tasks to be solved. The first one was to define whether there are any peculiarities of the hockey discourse. Secondly, to reconstruct a collective hockey identity according to the discourse they construct during communication. These tasks helped us to characterize the participants of hockey discourse as the ones with the status of “in-group” members and gives them a special level of trust from other members of the social group. The methods of the discourse analysis together with the cognitive modeling compose the basis of the research. In experiments 1 and 2, we found that the “in-member” and “off-member” statuses are drawn and ascribed by the participants according to the ability to correctly structure the meaning in hockey discourse. The cognitive analysis enabled us to build a cognitive model of collective hockey identity that is based on the representations of the hockey world drawn from the discourse in social media (Instagram pages of the NHL teams). Results of the experiments and cognitive modeling of the dominant concepts of the hockey collective identity prove several hypotheses. We found social effects of status demonstration via the construction of meaning in the process of discourse and the importance of being “in-member” for effective communication and satisfaction of the participants. Differences in hockey-oriented conversation between in-group members and off-group members are proved as we assumed in the hypothesis. We provide some evidence that in-group members` and off-group members` reconstruction of the meaning in communication can differ in conversations that are focused on a specific collaborative goal, though their verbal behavior is moderated by the employment of clear general vocabulary.Though the methods of the study introduce literal and statistical noise, putting people into more naturalistic contexts and examining discourse between interlocutors who have various levels of the English language competence can reveal differences that are hidden or discouraged in the laboratory.

Number agreement processing in adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD): evidence from event-related brain potentials

In morphologically richer languages, including French, one must learn the specific properties of number agreement in order to understand the language, and this learning process continues into adolescence. This study examined similarities and differences between French-speaking adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) when processing number agreement, and investigated how morpho-syntactic regularity affected language processing. Using event-related potentials (ERP) and only grammatical sentences with audio-visual mismatches, we studied ERP correlates to three types of number agreement: (1) regular determiner agreement in noun phrases, (2) regular subject-verb plural liaison, and (3) irregular subject-verb agreement. We also included a lexico-semantic mismatch condition to investigate lexico-semantic processing in our participants. 17 adolescents with DLD (M = 14.1 years) and 20 (pre)teens with typical language (TL, M = 12.2 years) participated in the study. Our results suggest three patterns. First, French-speaking teenagers without DLD are still consolidating their neurocognitive processing of morpho-syntactic number agreement and generally display ERP profiles typical of lower language proficiency than adult native speakers. Second, differences in morphosyntactic processing between teenagers with and without DLD seem to be limited to rule-based (regular) number agreement. Third, there is little evidence for corresponding differences in lexico-semantic processing.

Validation of a developmental screening tool from a national health program in India for screening speech-language disorders among children

Background Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK) is a Government of India initiative that aims to develop a structured approach toward child health screening and early intervention. Objectives The current study aimed to validate the RBSK developmental screening tool incorporated within a mobile-based application for screening of speech and language delays/disorders among children below 6 years of age Methods A total of 235 caregiver-child dyads including 96 children aged below 2;6 years; months and 139 children between 2;6 and 6;0 years participated in the study. Children underwent developmental screening by a Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) using the RBSK screening tool and specific speech-language screening using the Language Evaluation Scale Trivandrum (LEST) followed by detailed evaluation by another SLP, blinded to the results of the screening. Each item in the RBSK and LEST screening tools was rated as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ by observing the child’s performance. Results and conclusion Detailed assessment by the SLP identified 133 children with typical speech and language development and 102 children with speech and language disorders. The sensitivity and specificity (95% CI) of the RBSK screening tool against both detailed assessment by SLP and LEST screening with one-item criteria were similar at 100% (87.23-100) and 97.1% (89.82-99.65) respectively in the younger group and 97.33% (90.70-99.68) and 92.19% (82.70-97.41) respectively in the older age group. The RBSK screening tool implemented via an mhealth application by SLPs demonstrated adequate psychometric properties for screening speech-language disorders among children less than six years of age.

Six-year-olds’ comprehension of object-gapped relative clause sentences: Investigating the contribution of NP number mismatch

Comprehension of sentences with a center-embedded, object-gapped relative clause (ORC) is challenging for children as well as adults. Mismatching lexical and grammatical features of subject noun phrases (NPs) across the main clause and relative clause has been shown to facilitate comprehension. Adani et al. concluded that children’s comprehension improved under conditions of NP number mismatch (e.g., singular main clause subject and plural relative clause subject) as compared with NP number match (e.g., both singular subjects). However, their stimuli provided number information on verb phrases (VPs) as well as NPs creating a confound for conclusions about facilitative effects of NP number mismatch. In this study, we isolated the contribution of NP number mismatch. Notably, 32 6-year-olds with typical language participated in a center-embedded, ORC sentence comprehension task with 4 types of stimuli: (a) NP number mismatch without VP number information (NP mismatch only), (b) NP number match without VP number information (NP match only), (c) NP number mismatch with VP number mismatch (NP + VP mismatch), and (d) NP number match with VP number match (NP + VP match). Children selected one of four pictures in an array to a verbally presented relative clause sentence; 56 sentences were presented. The within-subjects comparison for NP mismatch only and NP match only was not significant. However, the within-subjects comparison for NP mismatch only and NP + VP mismatch was significant. Children were more successful in NP + VP mismatch sentence comprehension ([Formula: see text] = 0.70).

Asynchronies in Auditory and Language Development Obscure Connections to Phonological Deficits in Children

Purpose: For half a century, psycholinguists have been exploring the idea that developmental language disorders may have their roots in suprathreshold auditory dysfunctions, but results are inconclusive. Typical studies focus on relationships between temporal processing abilities and measures of various language skills at the time of testing, a proximal account. This study expanded that focus by testing three novel hypotheses: (a) Spectral processing impairments may be more responsible for language-learning deficits than temporal processing impairments. (b) Phonological sensitivity is likely the specific language skill most strongly affected by auditory (dys)functions. (c) Poor auditory functioning observed at young ages may wholly or partly recover, reducing the magnitude of relationship between those recovered functions and persistent language skills at older ages. Method: Sixty-six children (31 boys, 35 girls) 7–10 years of age participated: 36 with typical language and 30 with reading or speech disorder; from this sample two subsamples were designated: younger (7–8 years) and older (9–10 years) children. Four auditory measures were obtained of spectral modulation detection (0.5 and 2.0 cycles per octave) and temporal modulation detection (16 and 64 Hz). Four language measures were obtained, two lexicosyntactic and two phonological. Results: Younger children showed deficits in all auditory skills, but most strongly for spectral modulation detection at 0.5 cycles per octave; that measure was the only one for which older children showed deficits. Spectral modulation detection was the auditory function most strongly correlated with a language skill, and that language skill was phonological sensitivity. Conclusions: Early impairments in suprathreshold auditory functions, especially spectral processing, interfere with language acquisition at early stages, especially phonological sensitivity. Although auditory functions can recover to some extent, impairments in language skills persist, indicating that a distal account may more appropriately explain the relationship. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24730128

Morphosyntactic profiles among preschoolers with and without speech sound disorders

ABSTRACT The aim of the current study was to identify whether certain morphosyntactic constructs are more difficult for children with speech sound disorder than children with typical speech development. In this post-hoc study, we used chi-square analyses to identify group differences on individual questions on a standardised test of expressive morphosyntax. Participants included 80 preschool-age children, 40 with typical speech and language development (TD), and 40 with speech sound disorder and typical language development (SSD). A chi-square analysis revealed group (TD vs. SSD) differences in usage of subject pronouns, irregular past tense verbs, and yes/no interrogative formation. Ordinal logistic regression revealed that phonological awareness was related to irregular past tense verb use. Children with SSD may present with subclinical morphosyntax difficulties. Speech-language pathologists should consider incorporating morphosyntax assessment into test batteries for children with SSD.

Corpus of Mandarin Child Language: a preliminary study on the acquisition of semantic content categories in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers.

In studying language acquisition in children, sizable research studies have been focusing on the investigation of form and lexical semantics. This study aims to establish a child language database annotated both syntactically with part of speech and semantically with semantic content category to supplement the study of child language acquisition in the semantic domain beyond lexical level. The Corpus of Mandarin Child Language (CMCL) that documented the production of different semantic content categories by Mandarin-speaking children was established. Naturalistic language samples of 82 native Mandarin-speaking children aged 25-60 months, divided into three age groups, were obtained. The corresponding semantic content categories coded in each utterance were tagged according to previous studies, in addition to the annotations of part of speech. MLU and lexical diversity were examined and the usage and acquisition of different semantic content categories were also analyzed. The results regarding syntactic complexity and lexical diversity replicated the typical language acquisition pattern from previous studies, which supported the validity of the data obtained in the CMCL. To investigate the trajectory of acquisition of various semantic content categories by age, a 90% acquisition criterion was used. Our findings regarding the acquisition order of semantic content category were basically in line with previous studies in general, with some minor differences. This acquisition order observed is largely explained by the cognitive and syntactic complexity associated with the semantic content category, with additional influence from language specific properties and cultural specific factors of Mandarin. In addition, with the tags in both part-of-speech and semantic content category, the CMCL potentially provides a platform for examining the form-content interface in early child language acquisition, which also implies significantly on the theoretical and clinical ground.

Definition and terminology of developmental language disorders-Interdisciplinary consensus across German-speaking countries.

In recent years, there have been intense international discussions about the definition and terminology of language disorders in childhood, such as those sparked by the publications of the CATALISE consortium. To address this ongoing debate, a Delphi study was conducted in German-speaking countries. This study consisted of three survey waves and involved over 400 experts from relevant disciplines. As a result, a far-reaching consensus was achieved on essential definition criteria and terminology, presented in 23 statements. The German term 'Sprachentwicklungsstörung' was endorsed to refer to children with significant deviations from typical language development that can negatively impact social interactions, educational progress, and/or social participation and do not occur together with a potentially contributing impairment. A significant deviation from typical language development was defined as a child's scores in standardized test procedures being ≥ 1.5 SD below the mean for children of the same age. The results of this Delphi study provide a proposal for a uniform use of terminology for language disorders in childhood in German-speaking countries.

24 The Influence of Acculturation in Neuropsychological Test Performance of Hispanic-Americans

Objective:Stephenson (2000) suggested that acculturation is a phenomenon that immigrants and refugees ubiquitously experience. The level of acculturation is impacted by a person’s choice to allow how much of their cultural traits they decide to keep while adapting to the dominant society cultural traits. Depending on what immigrants find to be important or unimportant, it can influence future generations (i.e., their children) in how they will be developed and adapt into a dominant society. Hispanic-Americans are individuals that were born and reside in the United States and have a family background that extends to one of the Spanish speaking countries in Latin America or Spain. The typical language spoken by Hispanic families other than English is Spanish. It has been reported that Hispanics that are capable of speaking English may be afforded better and greater opportunities to resources. Research shows that a person level of acculturation can influence their cognition. In fact, in one study using a Mexican-American sample that was divided into two groups: high and low. Researchers found that highly acculturated Mexican-Americans outperformed lower acculturated Mexican-Americans on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. We evaluated the influence of acculturation in Hispanic-Americans neuropsychological test performance. It was predicted that highly acculturated Hispanic-Americans to American culture would demonstrate better cognitive abilities compared to lower acculturated Hispanic-Americans.Participants and Methods:The present study sample consisted of 75 neurologically and psychologically healthy Hispanic-American undergraduate students with a mean age of 19.44 (SD = 1.37). Participants were divided into two acculturation groups: high (n = 39) and low (n = 36). In addition, all the participants completed a comprehensive neuropsychological battery and background questionnaire in English. The Acculturation Rating Scale for Hispanic/Latino Americans is a 20-item scale that was utilized to create our acculturation groups. ANOVAs were used to evaluate cognitive differences between our acculturation groups.Results:Results revealed that the highly acculturated group outperformed the lower acculturated group on the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third Edition vocabulary task and the Boston Naming Test, p’s<.05, n.p’s2=.06. Furthermore, results revealed that the lower acculturated group outperformed the highly acculturated group on the Trail Making Test part A and B, and Comalli Stroop part A, p’s<.05, np’s2=.06-.07.Conclusions:As expected, the highly acculturated group demonstrated better language abilities compared to the lower acculturated group. However, in the opposite direction, the lower acculturated group outperformed the highly acculturated group on several speed attention tasks and one executive functioning task. A possible explanation why the highly acculturated participants demonstrated better language abilities may be attributed that their dominant language is English or they only spoke English. Meanwhile, the opposite could be said for lower acculturated participants that English was not their dominant language or they were bilingual speakers, for that reason they demonstrated better processing speed and executive functioning abilities. Research shows that monolinguals demonstrate better language abilities compared to bilinguals, but the opposite is found on processing speed and executive functioning tasks. Future research should investigate the relationship between bilingualism and acculturation in neuropsychological testing performance of Hispanic-Americans.

Does Movement Contextually Cue Attention During Novel Word Exposure? A Comparison of Preschool Children With Developmental Language Disorder and With Typical Language.

This study investigated the attentional tendencies of preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and their typical language (TL) peers during a word learning task to examine what visual properties of novel objects capture their attention. Twelve children with DLD and 12 children with TL completed a novel name extension task in which they selected which of three visual characteristics of referent objects (i.e., movement, color, pattern) was relevant during novel word-novel referent pairings. No visual feature was more relevant than the others; consequently, there were no correct and no incorrect responses. Children with DLD were systematically different from their TL peers in which visual features of objects they attended to during nonword-novel referent pairings in that they selected movement as the relevant feature of novel objects more often than TL children. There was also a significant negative correlation between chronological age and the propensity for movement selections. In most cases, word learning involves mapping the auditory signal onto visual information. Identifying what children with DLD naturally attend to when exposed to novel word-novel referent pairings is an important first step in order to better understand how to design effective and efficient word learning interventions with this population.

Subordination in Turkish Heritage Children with and without Developmental Language Impairment

A large body of cross-linguistic research has shown that complex constructions, such as subordinate constructions, are vulnerable in bilingual DLD children, whereas they are robust in bilingual children with typical language development; therefore, they are argued to constitute a potential clinical marker for identifying DLD in bilingual contexts, especially when the majority language is assessed. However, it is not clear whether this also applies to heritage contexts, particularly in contexts in which the heritage language is affected by L2 contact-induced phenomena, as in the case of Heritage Turkish in Germany. In this study, we compare subordination using data obtained from 13 Turkish heritage children with and without DLD (age range 5; 1–11; 6) to 10 late successive (lL2) BiTDs (age range 7; 2–12; 2) and 10 Turkish adult heritage bilinguals (age range 20; 3–25; 10) by analyzing subordinate constructions using both Standard and Heritage Turkish as reference varieties. We further investigate which background factors predict performance in subordinate constructions. Speech samples were elicited using the sentence repetition task (SRT) from the TODİL standardized test battery and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). A systematic analysis of a corpus of subordinate clauses constructed with respect to SRT and MAIN narrative production comprehension tasks shows that heritage children with TD and DLD may not be differentiated through these tasks, especially when their utterances are scored using the Standard Turkish variety as a baseline; however, they may be differentiated if the Heritage Turkish is considered as the baseline. The age of onset in the second language (AoO_L2) was the leading performance predictor in subordinate clause production in SRT and in both tasks of MAIN regardless of using Standard Turkish or Heritage Turkish as reference varieties in scoring.

An Ensemble of Text Convolutional Neural Networks and Multi-Head Attention Layers for Classifying Threats in Network Packets

Using traditional methods based on detection rules written by human security experts presents significant challenges for the accurate detection of network threats, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In order to deal with the limitations of traditional methods, network threat detection techniques utilizing artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning are being extensively studied. Research has also been conducted on analyzing various string patterns in network packet payloads through natural language processing techniques to detect attack intent. However, due to the nature of packet payloads that contain binary and text data, a new approach is needed that goes beyond typical natural language processing techniques. In this paper, we study a token extraction method optimized for payloads using n-gram and byte-pair encoding techniques. Furthermore, we generate embedding vectors that can understand the context of the packet payload using algorithms such as Word2Vec and FastText. We also compute the embedding of various header data associated with packets such as IP addresses and ports. Given these features, we combine a text 1D CNN and a multi-head attention network in a novel fashion. We validated the effectiveness of our classification technique on the CICIDS2017 open dataset and over half a million data collected by The Education Cyber Security Center (ECSC), currently operating in South Korea. The proposed model showed remarkable performance compared to previous studies, achieving highly accurate classification with an F1-score of 0.998. Our model can also preprocess and classify 150,000 network threats per minute, helping security agents in the field maximize their time and analyze more complex attack patterns.

Word-level reading skills of Brazilian children with developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show a wide range of impairments, including poor pre-reading skills and decoding difficulties due to phonological deficits and such difficulties have significant repercussions on the acquisition of written language. However, evidence about reading processes and development is mainly available for English-speaking children with DLD, limiting our understanding of this process in a cross-linguistic manner. The orthographic characteristics of languages significantly influence the learning process of written code. Unlike English, Brazilian Portuguese has a transparent decoding system and its orthography presents a set of consistent, univocal grapheme-phoneme relations. The present study investigated whether the challenges reported in decoding for children with DLD in opaque languages hold for children with DLD who are speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and whether the length and type of stimuli influence the decoding skills of children with DLD differently than when compared to children with typical language development (TLD). Sixteen children with DLD between seven and ten years of age who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and 64 controls with TLD matched by gender, age, and socioeconomic status, with the children with DLD in a 4:1 ratio; participated in the study. All children performed a computerized task where they were asked to decode a linguistically balanced list of words and nonwords designed according to Brazilian Portuguese decoding rules. The present study provides substantial evidence that children with DLD who are speakers of Brazilian Portuguese have deficits in the acquisition of decoding and that the decoding profile of children with DLD is subject to multiple influences, not only with relation to the length and type of stimuli but also characteristics of the languages these children are being literate in, highlighting the multifactorial nature involved in the development of decoding.

Metaphors and pseudometaphors of language as controversial messages in public discourse about Serbian

Abstract Set in the contemporary public discourse about the Serbian language, this paper demonstrates how metaphors of and about language constructed with the source domains of violence and war (e.g., language occupation, language as battlefield, to fight for language) may serve nationalistic political aims and act as conflict-inciting messages, under the pretenses of typical language purism or ‘language care’. The concept of pseudometaphor is introduced as a figuration-based discursive strategy whereby metaphors for language, underpinned by the language-language users metonymy, may serve as tools for covertly conveying controversial messages about their respective language users. The analysis covers public discourse published in a span of eight years (2010–2018), involving institutionalized language and political campaigns, and less institutionalized public language debates. As convergent evidence for pseudo-metaphoricity of the language-war/violence metaphors and their potential for instigating inter-ethnic conflict, the analysis includes critical voices that expose the dominant ideology through literalization of their metaphorical models.

Writing Errors of Children With Developmental Language Disorder

The purpose of this study was to compare the types of morphological and syntactic errors in written simple and complex sentences produced by children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with typical language (TL). We analyzed the writing products of 30 children with DLD and 33 children with TL for morphological (e.g., past tense -ed and BE verbs) and syntactic (e.g., word omission and word order) errors in simple and complex sentences. We found that children with DLD produced more regular and irregular past tense errors and syntactic errors than children with TL. We also found that the number of total errors produced by children with DLD was not different in simple versus complex sentences. The findings reported can be used as a starting point for adding writing assessment to speech–language pathologists' tool kit for serving children with DLD. We recommend that clinicians begin with analysis of past tense and syntactic errors when evaluating narrative writing skills of children with DLD.

The Role of Motivation in Second Language Acquisition of English

English learning is a typical second language course, so there are many challenges in the implementation of teaching activities and curriculum arrangement. From the perspective of second language acquisition theory, for second language teaching, whether it is in the curriculum design, teaching content arrangement, or specific teaching methods. This article attempts to investigate the role of motivation in second language acquisition of English. For students who are not inherently strong in language ability, there are many problems and obstacles in the process of language acquisition, which are much more difficult than other students. Therefore, these students not only lose confidence in language acquisition, but also lose motivation for English learning, ultimately affecting many students' English proficiency and application abilities. English speaking competitions, English gatherings, and other activities can be held to enrich their English learning life, stimulate and enhance students' interest in learning.

Complex Syntax Production in Informational Writing by Students With Language Impairment From Diverse Linguistic Backgrounds

The primary objective of this study was to compare the syntactic complexity of informational texts produced by fifth-grade students (a) with and without language impairment and (b) with and without native English-speaking proficiency on a curriculum-based reading and writing task. Expository writing samples produced by 114 children enrolled in the fifth grade were analyzed at the utterance level for five features of complex syntax, including the frequency of utterances containing complex syntax and specific clause types (conjoined, subordinate, relative, full complement). For each of the four groups, we report frequency counts, means, standard deviations, and ranges of performance across the five syntax measures. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed there were significant group differences on measures. Specifically, children with typical language development, regardless of English proficiency level, wrote more words, utterances, and different word roots than their peers with language impairment. When productivity (i.e., text length) in the writing samples was controlled, multivariate analysis of variance revealed there was a significant difference between groups in use of relative clauses, but not for the use of conjoined, subordinate, or full complement clauses. In particular, English proficient students with language impairment produced a greater proportion of utterances with relative clauses. A post hoc correlation analysis showed moderate, positive correlations among writing cohesion and variables of complex syntax. We consider multiple implications for clinical practice and further research.