We report four experiments investigating the effect of prosody on listening comprehension in 11-13-year-old children. Across all experiments, participants listened to short object descriptions and answered content-based questions about said objects. In Experiments 1-3, the descriptions were read in an emotionally positive or neutral tone of voice.…

Research has established positive associations between informal digital activities and vocabulary knowledge. However, understanding how different types of digital activities relate to various aspects of vocabulary knowledge is limited. This study examined how the purpose of informal digital activities and strategic engagement during and/or after…

Research on young English language learners has been gaining popularity in recent years, but to this day remains underdeveloped. The present study aimed to add to this body of research by exploring the effects of visual arts activities implemented via comprehension and compared to more commonly used flashcard activities implemented via…

This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

The current work investigates whether language dominance predicts transfer of skills across cognitive-linguistic levels from the native language (Spanish) to the second language (English) in bilingual preschoolers. Sensitivity to cognates ("elephant/elefante" in English/Spanish) and metalinguistic awareness (MLA) have both been shown to…

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination.…

Assessing vocabulary knowledge is an important part of establishing language proficiency in bilingual children. The crosslinguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) provide a framework for testing vocabulary development in three-to-six year-olds using a standard procedure and comparable items for multiple languages. This study describes the development of the…

The number of learners seeking to acquire an L2 by means of apps is ever-increasing. This study examined the effectiveness of using the app "Mondly" for the acquisition of L2 English vocabulary while accounting for differences in the acquisition of receptive and productive aspects of word knowledge. Twelve Danish young learners (aged…

Texts appear as the highest level units in language teaching. Textlinguistics researchers have put forward the thesis that the largest linguistic unit is the text, not the sentence. The main purpose of this research is to determine the effect of using textlinguistic analysis method and its ability to aid students in understanding the texts in…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

Purpose: Phonological complexity is known to be a good index of developmental language disorder (DLD) in normal-hearing children, who have major difficulties on some complex structures. Some deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) present a profile that evokes DLD, with persistent linguistic difficulties despite good audiological and…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

Vocabulary acquisition is a fundamental element of mastering the English language, necessitating a comprehensive lexicon that evolves through experiential learning to facilitate accurate comprehension and production of language. The current study examined the impact of Total Physical Response (TPR) tasks on the vocabulary acquisition of Thai…

This study investigated the effects of processing three types of texts, namely expository texts, narrative texts, and a combination of both known as twin texts, on incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention in L2 learners. College freshmen (N = 109), who were lower to upper intermediate learners of English, were assigned into a control group…

Generalization is the ability to apply regularities to novel instances, for example, correctly guessing that the plural for the novel English word 'wug' should be 'wugs'. Early language learners make overgeneralization errors like 'mouses', applying regularities beyond their attested uses. Theories concerned with the question of how learners learn…