This article explores how Confucius Institute teachers and U.S. students use language to index qualities of Chinese people and culture. The study draws on the model of "linguistic fact" to argue that students' and teachers' contextualized use of language occurs in relation to their different yet naturalized assumptions about a commonly…

Effective speaking exists in a group when the speakers' messages are so clear that the listeners respond as desired (Klopf, 1981, p. 76). In other words, the speakers' messages turn out to be exactly what they want and the listeners hear and understand exactly what the speakers said, and then act accordingly. This is in line with one of Confucius'…

This article reports on the results of two studies on receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge of first-year English majors in an English-medium degree programme. The aim of the study is to answer these research questions: (1) to what extent do the receptive and productive vocabulary sizes of English majors increase after a year of…

Purpose: To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children…

Though a number of language socialization processes are theorized to promote children's heritage language proficiency (HLP), little research has considered these processes in a single study and examined their prospective relations to multiple domains of HLP in school-age children. In a two-wave longitudinal study of Chinese American children of…

This study investigates the referential choice of Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The data consist of narratives from 16 children with ASD and 16 typically-developing (TD) children. The narratives were elicited using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" Participants' referential expressions…

The primary purpose of the present study was to test language and cognitive predictors of lexical selection in the storytelling of monolingual and bilingual children. Measures of language proficiency and cognitive ability were assessed with both English- and Mandarin-speaking monolinguals and Mandarin-English bilinguals aged 4 to 6 years old. To…

Purpose: This study examined the latent dimensionality of Spanish in young Spanish-English dual-language learners (DLLs). Method: Two hundred eighty-six children participated. In their prekindergarten year, children completed norm-referenced and experimental language measures in Spanish requiring different levels of cognitive processing in both…

Purpose: This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of a conversation-based intervention on the expressive vocabulary and grammatical skills of children with severe motor speech disorders and expressive language delay who use augmentative and alternative communication. Method: Eight children aged from 8 to 13 years participated in the study.…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

Background: Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a disharmonic linguistic profile with a clear pattern of strengths and weaknesses. Despite their sociable nature, atypical socio-communicative abilities and deficits in communication and relationship with others have been found. Aim: The aim of the present study was to investigate whether…

This study investigated how forty-six mothers modified their talk about familiar and unfamiliar nouns and verbs when interacting with their children with Down Syndrome (DS), language impairment (LI), or typical development (TD). Children (MLUs < 2·7) were group-matched on expressive vocabulary size. Mother-child dyads were recorded playing with…

The increasing use of emojis, digital images that can represent a word or feeling in a text or email, and the fact that they can be strung together to create a sentence with real and full meaning raises the question of whether they are creating a new language amongst technologically savvy youth, or devaluing existing language. There is however a…

Adult responsiveness is related to language development both in young typically developing children and in children with autism spectrum disorders, such that parents who use more responsive language with their children have children who develop better language skills over time. This study used a micro-analytic technique to examine how two facets…

Vagueness is one of the basic attributes of natural language. This is the same to advertising language. Vague language is a subject of increasing interest, and both foreign and domestic studies have attained success in it. Nevertheless, the study on the application of vague language in the context of English commercial advertising is relatively…