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…

AI-based simulations for educational and assessment purposes are gaining global recognition. Informed by cultural comparison research, this study investigates cross-country variations in users' utilization and perceptions of a simulation-based assessment. Specifically, we conducted a comparative analysis between a sample of South African and…

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,…

Purpose: This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English. Method: One hundred fifteen kindergarten and first-grade Spanish--English-speaking children completed measures of vocabulary and sentence repetition in Spanish and English. Scores were derived from…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to (1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by…

The substantial growth of online learning, and in particular, through massively open online courses (MOOCs), supports research into nontraditional learning contexts. Learners' confusion is one of the identified aspects which impact the overall learning process, and ultimately, course attrition. Confusion for a learner is an individual state of…

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.…

This study used a prospective community-based sample to describe patterns and predictors of language development from 4 to 7 years in verbal children (IQ = 70) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 26-27). Children with typical language (TD; n = 858-861) and language impairment (LI; n = 119) were used for comparison. Children with ASD and LI had…

Purpose: Elementary-age dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States are often characterized as at risk for low vocabulary in both Spanish and English. This longitudinal study examined conceptually scored receptive and expressive vocabulary development among DLLs from Spanish-speaking, low-income homes and…

Corpora are well-known for the affordance to make linguistic regularities salient. Since the coinage of the term 'data-driven learning' (DDL) in the 1990s, much has been done to investigate the effects of DDL on learning vocabulary, most notably lexico-grammatical patterns. However, less researched is how learners construct vocabulary knowledge…

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by (N = 243) children aged 2-5 and their caregivers were…

Terminal changes in fundamental frequency provide the most salient acoustic cues to declarative questions, but adults sometimes identify such questions from pre-terminal cues. In the present study, adults and 7- to 10-year-old children judged a single speaker's adult- and child-directed utterances as questions or statements in a gating task with…

Even young EFL learners who have not yet learned L2 grammar will notice language patterns if, when retrieving exemplars ("item-based patterns"), they succeed in making form-meaning connections (FMCs). Item-based patterns, termed formulaic sequences (FS), serve as a basis for creative constructions. Although learners are implicitly…

In the present study, we take a longitudinal, corpus-based perspective to investigate short-term (over 9 months) linguistic change in the language produced for the spoken and written sections of the "TOEFL iBT"® test by a group of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in China. The goal of the study is to identify patterns that…