Little systematic attention has been paid toward belonging for young children, particularly in contexts of diversity that are regularly part of school settings. Two-Way immersion (TWI) programs provide one educational context ideally suited for exploring the constructs of belonging and inclusion in linguistically and culturally diverse settings.…

This study focuses on the parental involvement among Eastern European immigrant parents of elementary school students in Canada. Interviewed parents (N + 19) were educated in several Eastern European countries and had children attending elementary schools in the province of Ontario at the time of the study. The analysis was informed by the…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

Many schools in Western countries like the United Kingdom have become increasingly diverse communities in recent years, and children are likely to be exposed to a variety of accents that are different from their own. While there is a wide body of research exploring accent comprehension in the adult population and in infancy, little has been done…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Working memory (WM) is a recognised component of executive function and has undergone scrutiny in terms of bilingual and monolingual performance comparisons. Research to date, however, has not consistently replicated the presence of bilingual advantage. The present study examined short-term (STM) and WM in immersion-educated children and a matched…

With the advent of touch-screen interfaces on the tablet computer, multisensory elements in reading instruction have taken on a new dimension. This computer assisted language learning research aimed to determine whether specific technology features of a tablet computer can add to the functionality of multisensory instruction in early reading…

Children with reading disability and normal reading development were compared in their ability to discriminate native (English) and novel language (Mandarin) from nonlinguistic sounds. Children's preference for native versus novel language sounds and for disyllables containing dominant trochaic versus non-dominant iambic stress patterns was also…

Does the intensification of what can be called "language-specific speech perception" around reading onset occur as a function of maturation or experience? Preschool 5-year-olds with no school experience, 5-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, 6-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, and 6-year-olds with 18 months' schooling were tested on…

This study focused on the associations of general auditory processing, speech perception, phonological awareness and word reading in Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong learning to read both Chinese (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]). Children in Grades 2--4 ("N" = 133) participated and were administered…

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) rely on knowledge of tongue placement to assess and provide intervention. A total of 175 SLPs who worked with children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) drew coronal diagrams of tongue/palate contact for 24 English consonants. Comparisons were made between their responses and typical English-speaking adults'…

This study investigated democratic values of pre-service English language teachers in relation to their teacher self-efficacy perceptions in a Turkish context. It also examined the possible relationships between gender, grade and democratic values and self-efficacy perceptions. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 294 pre-service teachers.…

Schools located near to airports are exposed to high levels of noise which can cause cognitive, health, and hearing problems. Therefore, this study sought to explore whether this noise may cause auditory language processing (ALP) problems in primary school learners. Sixty-one children attending schools exposed to high levels of noise were matched…