The number of older siblings a child has is negatively correlated with the child's verbal skills, an effect that is well known in the literature. However, few studies have examined the effect of older siblings' sex, of the age gap between siblings, of having foreign-speaking parents, as well as the mediating role of parental interaction. Using…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to evaluate the influence of explanatory texts characteristics on comprehension performances in children from 2nd to 9th grade. Method: Several metrics have been applied to 40 explanatory texts, accounting for length, complexity and age accuracy. Children were asked to read an age-appropriate text, and answer…

The present study in French sought to investigate which factors predict irony perception most efficiently. An experiment was developed following three steps. The first two steps focused on the creation of stimuli to be evaluated in the third step. In this last step, participants, whose sociocultural characteristics (gender, age, and level of…

Children develop early literacy and numeracy skills from an early age. The primary aim of the current study is to examen links between early literacy skills and early numeracy skills during preschool education in France. This study involves 313 kindergarten students (152 girls and 161 boys), aged between 3.44 and 7.02 years (mean age = 5.07 years,…

In this study, we examined the role of social learning theory in explaining academic dishonesty among 673 college students in the United States, France, and Greece. We found support for social learning theory such that perceived peer dishonesty was incrementally valid as a predictor of self-reported academic dishonesty across three countries…

Test anxiety is experienced by a substantial number of students in many school subjects, including physical education, and it may be deleterious for their school performance and their well-being. The aim of our study was to explore through multiple regression and mediation analyses the relationships between test anxiety in physical education,…

In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean length of utterances (MLU). A total of 312 speech samples…

This article examines cross-country variations in adult skills inequality and asks why skills in Anglophone countries are so unequal. Drawing on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's recent Survey of Adult Skills and other surveys, it investigates the differences across countries and country groups in inequality in both…

A common predictor of language gains during study abroad (SA) is amount of language use. Yet little attention has been given to determining what factors influence the extent of language use while abroad. Studies in this area have mainly been case studies of learners in single locations. In this larger study, we seek to determine variables…

Second language (L2) gains during study abroad have been related to several variables including length of stay (Llanes, 2011), language use (Martinsen, Baker, Dewey, Bown, & Johnson, 2010), and social network development (Isabelli-García, 2006), among others. However, most studies have investigated only a few predictors in single study abroad…

Examined the effects of type of distribution and type of response scale on observed integration patterns in five, six, and seven year olds. Findings showed that the effect of two factors, age and type of scale, were significant. (SH)

This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which…