Purpose: Adults recognize words that are acquired during childhood more quickly than words acquired during adulthood. This is known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. The AoA effect, according to the integrated account, manifests in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing and in tasks with arbitrary input-output mapping. Compound…

Children who speak with nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialects represent a growing population in the U.S. public school system. This article provides recommendations for how teacher educators can support novice teachers in addressing the needs of NMAE speakers with or at risk for learning disabilities. This article focuses on four core…

This paper provides an overview of UK Arabic language teaching in supplementary and mainstream schools from available research papers and provides a synopsis of recent developments in supporting Arabic teaching at school level and pathways to Higher Education. The largest study cited is the 2016 research collaboration between the British Council,…

Strikingly apparent within the demographics of New England, Portuguese is a language rich in standard and nonstandard varieties. In studying Portuguese, it is common for some students to acquire language more easily than their peers, despite receiving the same linguistic input, and others display negative attitudes toward their instructor's…

In this personal reflection, Sonia Nieto recounts the lessons she learned about language and literacy from learning to speak Spanish and then English; to reading and writing; and the impact of these lessons on her identity, teaching, research, and life; and, more broadly, on the fields of education and literacy.

In spontaneous conversations between adults, words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms. The question arises whether infant-directed speech also contains phonetic reduction. If so, infants would be presented with speech input that enables them to acquire reduced variants from an early age. This study…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

This study took place at the University of Wyoming, located in the rural mountain West. The University of Wyoming, with approximately 13,000 students, is the only four-year university in the state. The teacher education population of the College of Education is about 600, and demographically, this population is about 90% White, predominately…