Intercultural competence (IC) has been identified as a crucial outcome of world language education. The purpose of the study is to compare possible differences in IC development between face-to-face and asynchronous virtual modes of delivery that were taken as emergency measures early in the COVID-19 pandemic for a beginning Italian course with…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive "-s," whereas the…

Language is subject to a variety of pressures. Recent work has documented that many aspects of language structure have properties that appear to be shaped by biases for the efficient communication of semantic meaning. Other work has investigated the role of social pressures, whereby linguistic variants can acquire positive or negative evaluation…

Computational models of child language development can help us understand the cognitive underpinnings of the language learning process, which occurs along several linguistic levels at once (e.g., prosodic and phonological). However, in light of the replication crisis, modelers face the challenge of selecting representative and consolidated infant…

Exemplar-based learning requires: (1) a segmentation procedure for identifying the units of past experiences that a present experience can be compared to, and (2) a similarity function for comparing these past experiences to the present experience. This article argues that for a learner to learn a language these two mechanisms will require…

Hudson Kam (2018) examined whether learning of a particular aspect of language that adults are known to have difficulty with (grammatical gender) could be improved by manipulating the learning experience of adults so that it was more like that of infants. Specifically, based on likely differences between adult and child learners' experiences as…

Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for input-based language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children's (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents' use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child's use of inflectional affixes and their…

Purpose: Toddlers with late language emergence have difficulty acquiring an object vocabulary that is well defined by shape early in development. Without object words, subsequent language growth is delayed. The current study tested an intervention scaffold that highlights object shape during word teaching so that toddlers with late language…

Writing is hard for students who are learning English; they often find it challenging to transform what is on their mind in writing. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between the writing test and assessment writing through argumentative writing. Data was analyzed using the correlation test to determine the close relationship between…

Each game within the Ignite by Hatch™ gaming environment belongs to an overall developmental domain and skills-based subdomain and is intended to meet the developmental needs of children at specific skill levels. These skill levels (Beginning, Emerging, Intermediate, Accomplishing, and Proficient+) form an intended developmental pathway. Children…

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

Since Swain's (1985) Output Hypothesis, producing output in second language (L2) has been assumed to be a crucial cognitive process that promotes L2 acquisition, by actively facilitating various cognitive processes (e.g., noticing, hypothesis testing, conscious reflections of own language use, and automatization of the linguistic knowledge) (de…

Noise, although ubiquitous, is seldom considered as a factor that may impede learning. In South Africa, most learners are multilingual and learn in English, which is their second language. Most noise studies have been conducted in the Global North, where the school context differs from the Global South. In this article, using questions selected…

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have smaller vocabularies in infancy compared to typically-developing children. To understand whether their smaller vocabularies stem from problems in learning, our study compared a prospective risk sample of 18 elevated risk and 11 lower risk 24-month-olds on current vocabulary size and…