A premise of statistical learning research is that learners attend to and learn the frequencies of co-occurring sounds in the input, or phonotactic sequences. Inherent to the concepts of both frequency and phonotactics is order, or the temporal arrangement of the relevant elements. Order is similarly inherent to statistical learning, yet the…

Previous empirical research has shown that Portuguese children aged 4;0 to 6;0 are sensitive to the quality of stem-final vowels when acquiring the irregular plural forms of /l/-final words (acquisition order: plurals of /al, [epsilon]l, [Greek small reversed lunate sigma symbol]l, ul/ > plurals of /il/). This study presents a formal account of…

As an integral part of dynamic assessment, computerized dynamic assessment (CDA) offers learners computer-assisted automated mediation. Accordingly, the possible efficacy of corrective feedback seems to be enhanced with new technologies, such as artificial intelligence tools, that offer automatic corrective feedback. Using technology-enhanced…

Purpose: This study investigated the dimensionality of language in bilingual children using measures of semantics and morphosyntax in English and Spanish. Method: Participants included 112 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4-8 years from a wide range of language abilities and dominance profiles. Using measures of semantics and morphosyntax…

The boundary effect, namely the infants' failures to compare small and large numerosities, is well documented in studies using visual stimuli. The prevailing explanation is that the numerical system used to process sets up to 3 is incompatible with the system employed for numbers >3. This study investigates the boundary effect in 10-month-old…

Studying early language development has been a challenging task throughout the years. Earlier studies mostly documented language competence only after toddlers had started producing their first words. Theoretical and methodological advances in this domain brought about more sophisticated ways of probing into early development by exploiting overt…

Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape-based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following…

Children make use of various information in linguistic input to learn verbs, including syntactic distribution and semantic features. Within the intransitive verb class, unaccusative and unergative verbs differ in distribution with respect to word order as well as in semantic features such as telicity. Both the distributional and semantic…

In this final article in this guest-edited issue on synergies in second language acquisition and teaching (SLA/T), we attempt to bring together the main content of this issue in an overall, combined synergy statement, concluding this project as a whole. Let us remind readers of the project: A shared effort by 17 scholars taking 11 different…

Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global and local aspects of lexical diversity in three…

This article presents a theoretical review of and methodological guidelines for the study of two key notions in second language acquisition research, complexity and difficulty. The term "complexity" has gained considerable currency over the past decades and has taken on a wide range of meanings. We argue for a more restricted…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) intervention could be efficaciously applied to a new treatment target: words a child neither understood nor said. We also assessed whether the type of context variability used to encourage semantic learning (i.e., action or object)…

Little is known about language development after late-to-moderate premature birth, the most significant part of prematurity worldwide. We examined minimal-pair word-learning skills in 18 eighteen-month-old healthy full-term (mean gestational age [GA] at birth = 39.6 weeks; 7 males; 100% Caucasian) and 18 healthy late-to-moderate preterm infants…

The study of Hebrew, a non-European language written in a non-alphabetic (abjadic) script offers valuable insights into the science of reading beyond the well-studied alphabetic scripts. Because reading development in Hebrew is shaped by the uniquely Semitic root-and-pattern morphology and the abjadic (predominantly consonantal) orthography, our…

In this Methods Showcase Article, we illustrate mixed-effects modeling with a multinomial dependent variable as a means of explaining complexities in language. We model data on future-time reference in second language Spanish, which consists of a nominal dependent variable that has three levels, measured over 73 participants. We offer step-by-step…