This systematic review addressed the following question: Which are the relations between L1 and/or L2 foundational and upper-level language skills, cognitive skills, high-order cognitive and self-regulation factors and L2-English reading comprehension skills in 11-to-19 year EFL secondary school students with different L1 language profiles?…

Children achieve better long-term language outcomes than adults. However, it remains unclear whether children actually learn language "more quickly" than adults during real-time exposure to input--indicative of true superior language learning abilities--or whether this advantage stems from other factors. To examine this issue, we…

Theories of reading comprehension have widely predicted a role for syntactic skills, or the ability to understand and manipulate the structure of a sentence. Yet, these theories are based primarily on English, leaving open the question of whether this remains true across typologically different languages such as English versus Chinese. There are…

While much of the existing literature on code-switching focuses on languages that differ typologically, this dissertation focuses on typologically similar languages. Code-switching between Mandarin and Taiwanese is examined through the perspectives of 1) sociolinguistics, 2) typology, 3) phonetic and phonological production, and 4) speech…

A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word…

Diagnostic classification models (DCMs) have recently become very popular both for research purposes and for real testing endeavors for student assessment. A plethora of DCM models give researchers and practitioners a wide range of options for student diagnosis and classification. One intriguing option that some DCM models offer is the possibility…

The aim of this study was to examine classification accuracy for the expressive language skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in terms of object play and imitation scores. A total of 61 children with ASD, who were 2.0-5.11 years old, were included in the study. In order to collect data play and imitation assessment tasks which…

Purpose: Sentence repetition (SR) is believed to be a clinical marker for developmental language disorder (DLD) across many languages. This study explored the potential of a self-designed Mandarin SR task (MSRT) to reflect Mandarin-speaking preschoolers' language ability and to differentiate children with and without DLD in this population.…

This study is a comparative examination of reading behavior of first-language (L1) Canadian and second-language (L2) Finnish and German readers of English. We measured eye-movement patterns during reading the same set of English sentences and administered tests of English vocabulary, spelling, and exposure to print. The core of our study is a…

Background: The majority of children with cerebral palsy (CP) experience challenges in functional communication from a young age. A pivotal aspect of functional communication is language comprehension. A variety of classification systems and questionnaires are available to classify and describe functional communication skills in children with CP.…

Traditionally, the New Zealand Ministry of Education opposed the recognition of dyslexia. However, since 2007, the Ministry of Education's position has started to change, evidenced by the development of a working definition. In 2021 the Ministry of Education released Three Steps in Screening for Dyslexia (TSSD), an assessment protocol designed to…

Research Findings: A constellation of social positions of difference can contribute to substantial variation among children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. Using data from the "Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey" 2009 cohort, the present study identified intersectional typologies of cultural…

The purpose of this research is to set the characteristics of the contents of the course books that are prepared for the lessons of mother tongue education in secondary schools in different countries. Within the frame of the purpose, the content of the course books in Germany, Austria, Finland, Northern Macedonia, Hungary and Turkey were analyzed…

The relationship between first and second language in early vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children is still debated in the literature. This study compared the expressive vocabulary of 39 equivalently low-SES two-year-old bilingual children from immigrant families with different heritage languages (Romanian vs. Nigerian English) and the same…

We examined the relation of morphological awareness with language and literacy skills, namely phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, vocabulary, word reading, spelling, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. We also examined potential moderators of the relations (grade level, orthographic depth of language, receptive vs.…