Toddlers with smaller vocabulary than expected for their age are considered late talkers (LT). This study explored the effects of characteristics of words on vocabulary acquisition of 12- to 24-month-old LT children compared with an age matched (AM) and a vocabulary matched (VM) group of typically developing peers. Using the…

Children's idiom comprehension is an important aspect of language development. Idioms have both literal and figurative meanings, and there are often great differences between literal meaning and figurative meaning, which brings great difficulties to children's accurate understanding of idioms. As a kind of underlying language ability,…

Vocabulary knowledge is of paramount importance when learning a second language. It requires effective and practical classroom vocabulary learning methods for long-term acquisition. Specific learning aspects helping the learner remember vocabulary such as spaced repetition and retrieval practice have shown efficacy but are often disconnected from…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to evaluate whether Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) demonstrated early lexical composition similar to their hearing peers who were at the same vocabulary level and the extent to which children with CIs were sensitive to linguistic and conceptual properties when developing early lexicon.…

Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

Thinking together in primary classrooms has received much scholarly attention in recent years, with a focus on educational dialogue at the forefront of studies concerned with identifying what constitutes effective language for learning. Whilst the expression of explicit reasoning is often discussed, less attention has been given to the role that…

Teaching English through idioms and proverbs is one of the ways to help students' better understanding the use of English. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the frequency, interest and learning style of idioms and proverbs among first-year students at University of Khanh Hoa, Khanh Hoa province, Vietnam. It is hypothesized that…

Single word items have usually been the unit of analysis for measuring L2 learners' vocabulary size, for designing word lists and for estimating word coverage of reading texts. However, what is lost in these estimates is the consideration of multiword expressions, such as idioms. To empirically test the assertion that the knowledge of single word…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with deficient comprehension of figurative language and, specifically, idioms. Theories ascribe this to deficits in specific abilities (e.g., Theory of Mind [ToM]; executive functions [EF]; general language skills), but no comprehensive theory has resulted. This study investigated the differential…

This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory…

Corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) is an inductive instructional approach using computer-generated concordances. It provides students with the opportunity to analyze different language forms across contexts found in the concordance output. The idea of engaging students to discover the language rules and patterns from authentic learning…

The aim of this study is to monitor, analyse and assess the effectiveness of using idioms in mastering students' vocabulary knowledge and improving speech in EFL class. The leading research method was a three-stage experiment. To successfully conduct the experiment, there were compiled a list of an active vocabulary and a list of English idioms…

Recent research that explored how input exposure and learner characteristics influence novel L2 morphosyntactic pattern learning has exposed participants to either text or static images rather than dynamic visual events. Furthermore, it is not known whether incorporating eye gaze cues into dynamic visual events enhances dual pattern learning.…

In this study, it was searched for the extent to which proverbs and idioms were included in the children's books that were taught to elementary school students. Children's books which are taught at the stage of children's vocabulary enriched rapidly and significantly, present the vocabulary of the mother tongue and its universe of meaning to a…

Onomatopoeia are frequently identified amongst infants' earliest words (Menn & Vihman, 2011), yet few authors have considered why this might be, and even fewer have explored this phenomenon empirically. Here we analyze mothers' production of onomatopoeia in infant-directed speech (IDS) to provide an input-based perspective on these forms.…