Purpose: This study examined science achievement; science vocabulary knowledge; and the relationship between science vocabulary, language skills, and science achievement in school-age children with language/literacy disorders (LLDs) and typical language development (TD). Method: Thirty-nine sixth graders (11 with LLDs) completed standardized…

Purpose: Response times (RTs) are commonly used in studying language acquisition. However, previous research utilizing RT in the context of language has largely overlooked the intra-individual variability (IIV) of RTs, which could hold significant information about the processes underlying language acquisition. Method: We explored the association…

Preschoolers' language abilities are associated with their social interactions in early childhood classrooms. Few studies, however, have examined associations between social interactions and objective measures of children's real-time classroom language environments, information key to informing interventions to support preschool children at risk…

Large individual differences in language skills are well documented in monolingual children (e.g., Kidd, Donnelly & Christiansen, 2018). In bilinguals, the broad variation is even more pronounced. Interestingly, some bilingual children might be weak in their Heritage Language (HL, also labeled as Minority Language, Home Language, Community…

Psychological variables remain a much under-investigated sub-category of individual differences (IDs) compared with cognitive ones. The present paper aims to gain a better understanding of the psychological effects of bilingualism by investigating national identity (NI), a socio-psychological construct, based on big data, that has rarely been…

Purpose: This study aims to develop a teaching model of the Malay language for non-native and foreign speakers in schools. Implementing this model can assist educators in teaching the Malay language to students who do not use it as their first language in everyday use. Methodology: This study used a qualitative approach to develop teaching models…

Purpose: Children with typical development vary in how much experience they need to learn words. This could be due to differences in the amount of information encoded during periods of input, consolidated between periods of input, or both. Our primary purpose is to identify whether encoding, consolidation, or both, drive individual differences in…

The current study examined whether children with and without ADHD differed in text processing when contradictory information was present. Forty-seven children between 10 and 14 years old performed a self-paced reading task. Half the passages contained contradictory information. Additionally, language and cognitive skills were assessed to examine…

Willingness to communicate (WTC), a recent affective construct of SLA research, has experienced a paradigm shift regarding its nature. Current WTC research tends to define it as a dynamic and context-bound structure rather being in a linear and static disposition. New conceptualization is based on Complex Dynamic System (CDS) theory. This theory…

Although language samples are child-friendly and well-suited for obtaining global measures of language production, structured protocols have the potential to elicit many different exemplars of language structures in a shorter amount of time. We created a structured elicitation protocol, the Sentence Diversity Priming Task (SDPT), to efficiently…

Previous studies show that linguistic information and talker information interact during processing. Familiarity with a language facilitates talker processing, and familiarity with a talker's voice facilitates linguistic processing. To probe the factors involved in talker processing, researchers examined how individual differences in reading…

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in case studies and surveys by researchers of second language acquisition (SLA) and cognitive (neuro-)science to probe into the group of exceptionally talented multilingual learners or polyglots who can understand and speak an impressive number of multiple foreign languages other than their own mother…

Paradis' (2023) keynote article is a timely documentation of the ongoing shift in focus within childhood bilingualism research from investigating the factors that modulate majority or second language (ML/L2) attainment (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011) to understanding the sources of variation that lead to minority heritage language (HL)…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show atypical attention, particularly for social events. The new Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP) assesses fine-grained individual differences in attention disengagement, maintenance, and audiovisual matching for social and nonsocial events. We investigated the role of competing…

Socioeconomic status (SES)-related language gaps are known to widen throughout the course of the school years; however, not all children from lower SES homes perform worse than their higher SES peers on measures of language. The current study uses mediation and moderated mediation to examine how cognitive and language abilities (vocabulary,…