This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French "aspirateur," Catalan "aspirador"…

Intercultural studies have underexplored the issue of children's theatre as a tool for symbolic representations of (new, hybrid) identities. In this paper, I analyze two theatrical productions addressing both Spanish society and Romanian diaspora (first/second generation) to answer these questions: how are diasporic identities re-constructed in…

The Sylheti Bangla, a variety of Bangla language is primarily spoken in the Sylhet District of Bangladesh, Barak Valley of Assam, Tripura, especially in North Tripura. The systematic perusal on English spoken by Sylheti Bangla speakers demonstrates that it carries a huge difference with English (RP) specially in respect to pronunciation, syllable…

Language classroom interactions can be characterized as multimodal, since teachers may resort to a variety of resources provided by their body or by their immediate space in order to convey meaning, manage activities and assess pupils' performances. Furthermore, teachers' multimodal practices constitute an essential component for the…

Few standardized language assessments are adapted to different cultural and linguistic contexts to assess children's first language (L1) abilities. We introduce the Ivorian Children's Language Assessment Toolkit for measuring phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness in the Abidji, Attié, and Baoulé languages of…

Children are known to use different types of referential gestures (e.g., deictic, iconic) from a very young age. In contrast, their use of non-referential gestures is not well established. This study investigated the use of "stroke-defined non-referential" 'beat' gestures in a story-retelling and an exposition task by twelve 6-year-olds,…

This study explores the use of F0, intensity and duration in the production of two types of prominences in French: primary accent with duration as the main acoustic cue, and secondary accent with F0 and intensity as acoustic cues. These parameters were studied in 13 children using a cochlear implant (CI) and 17 children with a normal hearing (NH),…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate deficits in vocabulary development and novel word learning processes, which have been proposed to stem from their speech perception deficits. Aims: This study had two aims. The first was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention incorporating a computer-based phonetic…

This study examined the roles of first-language (L1) Chinese and second-language (L2) English phonological skills in English and Chinese reading comprehension, respectively, and their association with reading comprehension difficulties among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. We tested 258 second graders on nonverbal intelligence,…

This study critically explored Filipino third graders' fluency in science to determine their readiness to comprehend and understand fourth level science, which is taught in English. This mixed design case research purposively sampled 30 third graders from a government-owned elementary school. An oral reading technique using a pre-selected science…

This paper outlines the results of a long-term study of 159 German-speaking primary school children. The correlations between musical skills (perception and differentiation of rhythmical and tonal/melodic patterns) and decoding skills, and the effects of musical training on word-level reading abilities were investigated. Cognitive skills and…

A 4-stage developmental model, in which auditory sensitivity is fully mediated by speech perception at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels, which are further related to word reading through their associations with phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal short-term memory and morphological awareness, was tested with…