Purpose: In spite of improvements in language outcomes for children with hearing loss (HL) arising from cochlear implants (CIs), these children can falter when it comes to academic achievement, especially in higher grades. Given that writing becomes increasingly relevant to educational pursuits as children progress through school, this study…

Preschoolers born preterm are at an increased risk for adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes; however, the impact of preterm birth on speech development has not been fully investigated. The primary objective of this study was to document the conversational speech production abilities of preschoolers born preterm via speech sample analysis. A…

Input is considered one of the most important factors in the acquisition of lexical and grammatical skills. Input has been found to interact with other factors, such as learner cognitive skills and the circumstances where language is heard. Language learning itself has sometimes been found to enhance cognitive skills. Indeed, intensive contact…

Purpose: We previously reported evidence of true double dissociation between reading accuracy and reading rate in a large unselected sample of Hebrew-speaking fourth graders and a large clinical sample of adult Hebrew-speakers with dyslexia. The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings to Arabic, which is structurally similar to…

The practice of integrating listening and speaking in the classroom emanates from a belief that the attainment of proficiency in oral production is associated with listening since learners are plunged into the rich exposure of language input by means of listening tasks. Engaging in meaningful communication puts great demands on grammatical…

This study aims to investigate the perception of phonological, grammatical, and semantic structures by 8 children (age range: 8;2-9;5) with developmental language disorders (DLD). Another 8 age-matched (age range: 8;4-10;0) typically developing (TD) children served as controls. The results demonstrated that children with DLD had lower performance…

The Arabic writing system allows for two representations: vowelized or non-vowelized. The vowelized writing, which characterizes the writing in the Koran, classical literature and children's books, includes the long and short vowels and all the vowels, including the vowels that express syntax functions (the final vowels). In non-vowelized writing,…

Listening has been widely characterised as a multifaceted process encompassing a range of linguistic and psycholinguistic components (see Rubin, 1994). However, for learners at different levels of L2 proficiency, there is uncertainty over the relative importance of the various sub-skills. To address this issue, a number of linguistic and…

Purpose: Narrative skill represents a higher-level linguistic skill that shows incremental development in the preschool years. During these years, there are considerable individual differences in this skill, with some children being highly skilled narrators (i.e., precocious) relative to peers of their age. In this study, we explored the…

This research aims at exploring in an irregular orthographic system like French, if spelling is related to written composition. French spelling is particularly interesting because it includes phonographic irregularities (i.e., inconsistencies), lexical difficulties and numerous morphological silent marks (e.g., plural noun, adjective, and verb…

Research Findings: The present study compared effects of explicit instruction on and practice with the phonological form of words (form-focused instruction) versus explicit instruction on and practice with the meaning of words (meaning-focused instruction). Instruction was given via interactive storybook reading in the kindergarten classroom of…

This study examines the relationship between different types of language learning aptitude (measured via the LLAMA test) and adult second language (L2) learners' attainment in speech production in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms. Picture descriptions elicited from 50 Japanese EFL learners from varied proficiency levels were analyzed…

This study examines the influence of language environment on language and reading skills and the cross-linguistic contributions to reading outcomes in 132 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 7-12 (52% female; 98% Hispanic). We present three major findings: children's language knowledge is separable into general (e.g., phonological awareness)…

Previous research has shown that English regular past-tense forms are difficult to perceive, yet perception studies to date have used experimentally manipulated input, and none has investigated how contextual cues, beyond temporal adverbials, affect the perception of the regular past. This study investigated whether second language (L2) learners…

The aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of cross-linguistic differences in the time course of determiner selection during language production. In Germanic languages, participants are slower at naming a picture using a determiner + noun utterance ("die Katze" "the cat") when a superimposed distractor is…