Recent research suggests that caregiver-child extratextual talk during shared book reading facilitates the development of preschool children's oral language skills. This study investigated the effects of the amount of picturebook text on mother-child extratextual talk during shared book reading. Twenty-four mother-child dyads (children aged…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-"ba" alternation. The first two…

This study addressed the potential methodological issues effect of attentional condition on subsequent vocabulary development from a different perspective, which addressed several potential methodological issues of previous research that have been based on psycholinguistic notion of second language learner as a limited capacity processor. The…

Evidence for the role of corrective input as a facilitator of language acquisition is inconclusive. Studies show links between corrective input and grammatical use of some, but not other, language structures. The present study examined relationships between corrective parental input and children's errors in the acquisition of the Spanish copula…

This quasiexperimental study examined the effects of different focus-on-form techniques, and the durability of such effects, on adolescent beginners' acquisition of request supportive moves. Three treatments were implemented: (1) the incidental group was exposed to input and involved in meaningful output activities; (2) the implicit group was…

This article aims at validating a coding scheme designed to investigate the precursors of academic language occurring in early caretaker-child interactions. Exposure to the academic dimensions of language is an important asset for children to be successful in academic settings. The proposed analytical framework, based on systemic functional…

Experimental second language acquisition research typically investigates the effectiveness of instruction in terms of overall group gains. A particular instructional method may not, however, benefit all learners uniformly. This study, conducted in a New Zealand secondary school, establishes whether there is any relationship between the…