This systematic review aims to explore how task complexity and task sequencing affect the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of second language performance. Through an analysis of studies conducted between 2012 and 2021, this review investigates the characteristics of the studies, operationalisation of task complexity, measurements of CAF,…

The research report describes the ability of Kazakh preschool children to tell narratives relating to mental states, and the connection with theory of mind tasks about false beliefs. Three groups of preschool children (N = 29; 3-, 4-, and 5- year-olds) from the city of Almaty were tested in the Kazakh language. The results show very high…

Anticipatory planning, that is, the ability to process information in advance to prepare to act, underpins activities that unfold in time, such as spoken language, reading and handwriting. One key, though not the only, mechanism that may facilitate anticipatory planning is rhythm, which is understood as the structured grouping of events in time.…

Background/purpose: Language is essential for communication and thought, enabling learners to convey ideas and emotions through structured speech supported by gestures, expressions, and intonation. Oral expression, a key educational skill, involves intellectual, linguistic, and physiological processes shaped by cultural and linguistic factors.…

Background: Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) impacts various aspects of children's language abilities, including the processing of inflectional morphology. Prior research suggests that children with DLD exhibit deficits in processing speed and sensitivity to grammatical inflections, yet the relationship between these deficits remains unclear.…

Background/purpose: Indonesian language education at the senior high school level is expected to foster not only linguistic competence but also critical thinking and cultural awareness. Textbooks, as the primary learning instrument, must be evaluated for their alignment with curriculum goals and global literacy demands. Materials/methods: This…

Although most children learn to communicate in their first language (L1), there is normal and expected variation in their rate of acquisition across all components of the language system. Until recently, most second language acquisition and second language (L2) researchers have assumed that individual differences (IDs) in L1 acquisition are small…

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is a component of constructive imagination. It is defined as the process of mentally juxtaposing objects into novel combinations. For example, to comprehend the instruction "put the cat under the dog and above the monkey," it is necessary to use PFS in order to correctly determine the spatial arrangement of the…

Mental State Talk (MST) is utterances describing invisible mental aspects. The first aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of Parental MST and Child MST and their concurrent association in a Swedish population, and the second aim was to relate these MST measures to the children's general language abilities. Seventy-seven dyads…

Many Hispanic adult immigrants to the United States acquire sufficient English skills to enable them to function in daily life but are left feeling that their skills are inadequate for college work. The problem addressed by the study is that the factors that are predictive of successful acquisition of college-level English skills had not been…

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…

The development of children's future-oriented cognition has become a popular research topic in the past two decades. Much of this research focuses on the preschool and middle childhood years, but very little is known about the future-oriented cognitive abilities of toddlers and young preschoolers. The present study investigated the emergence of…

Disfluencies such as pauses, "um"s, and "uh"s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different…

Background/purpose: This study explores the integration of Augmented Reality (AR) into English for Tourism and Hospitality (ETH) instruction to examine its effects on the speaking skills of Vietnamese EFL university students. The research investigates how AR-supported lessons influence learners' fluency, pronunciation, confidence, and engagement…

Construct validity and building validity arguments are some of the main challenges facing the language assessment community. The notion of construct validity and validity arguments arose from research in psychological assessment and developed into the gold standard of validation/validity research in language assessment. At a theoretical level,…