Purpose: There is solid evidence that an early age at cochlear implantation, which reduces the period of auditory deprivation, positively impacts early spoken language development. However, there is an urgent need for more research to understand the long-term effects of early implantation on higher linguistic skills, such as metaphor…

Purpose: This study focuses on 7- to 9-year-old children attending primary school in Swedish areas of low socioeconomic status, where most children's school language is their second language. The aim was to better understand what factors influence these children's narrative listening comprehension both in an ideal listening condition (in quiet)…

This article describes the lexical and syntactic development of written narratives in 24 deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students aged between 8 and 18 and takes into account how their varying linguistic backgrounds may predict their written performance. All participants use spoken Swedish, but the study also considers their proficiency in Swedish…

This study investigated what psychological and social factors predict 'perceived nativelikeness' in late second language (L2) learners of French (L1 Swedish) (N = 62) with a minimum length of residence (LOR) of 5 years in France. The included factors were: language aptitude (LLAMA), acculturation (VIA), personality (MPQ), target language…

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children (N = 17). "Baby Birds/Baby Goats" from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina "et al.," 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the intelligibility of children's atypical speech in relation to listeners' language background. Method: Forty-eight participants listened to and transcribed isolated words repeated by children with speech sound disorders. Participants were divided into, on the one hand, a multilingual group (n = 29) that…

The aim of this study is to contribute knowledge about the politics of belonging that is embedded in the educational practice of early childhood institutions in Sweden, with the focus on children's doing of belonging. The research questions are: What appears as important aspects for belonging in everyday children's interactions in the ECE…

Aims: This study investigated which specific socio-demographic characteristics of the family and child health service centre are associated with parents receiving a video guide. The video guide, intended to be offered universally, aimed at promoting language and literacy development. Methods: The video guide included language and literacy…

The present study reports on the development of a questionnaire that evaluates children's experiences of their physical classroom environment, activities and interactions. It also explores the psychometric properties of the questionnaire and how acoustical characteristics of the classroom, class size and student characteristics (age, sex and…

Focusing on children's play, the present article explores how 3- to 6-year-old children (re)produce, (re)negotiate and challenge heteronormativity in a Swedish Early Childhood Education setting. The article is based on ethnographic data, focusing on (re)production of heteronormativity in a particular kind of idealized, often feminine-coded and…

Media promotes to what extent immigrants learn the host language and cultural values. Consequently, the overall aim of this paper is to identify predictors among adult immigrants in language training and its effect on host language training. The participants (n = 186)-- many of them refugees--were recruited purposefully for the study from one…

This research seeks to increase the knowledge about the role of language in the teaching of human rights. The specific interest is to examine how language use extends and specifies the human rights learning situation. Drawing on John Dewey's arguments for two main constituents of an educative language use--the extension of vocabulary and rendering…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the caudal zona incerta (cZi) affects speech intelligibility in persons with essential tremor. Method: Thirty-five participants were evaluated: off stimulation, on chronic stimulation optimized to alleviate tremor, and during unilateral stimulation at increasing…