Within the same learning context, learners' outcomes in terms of oral fluency vary greatly. This study tracked the relative contributions that first language (L1) and initial second language (L2) fluency skill and working memory (WM) made to L2 fluency development. We assessed the performance of French-speaking Grade 6 learners' (n = 47, mean age:…

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

Purpose: This study builds a new system for automatically assessing learners' speech elicited from an oral discourse completion task (DCT), and evaluates the prediction capability of the system with a view to better understanding factors deemed influential in predicting speaking proficiency scores and the pedagogical implications of the system.…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object…

Children's ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children's learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a "pseudohomophone") has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when…

Research on collaborative learning has revealed that peer-collaboration explanation activities facilitate reflection and metacognition and that establishing common ground and successful coordination are keys to realizing effective knowledge-sharing in collaborative learning tasks. Studies on computer-supported collaborative learning have…

Transfer is not static but a dynamic process of learning. In this article, the concept of transfer and the implications of its study are reconsidered from the theoretical basis of the complex dynamic system approach. We describe "transfer" as an emergent process that implies not a copy of knowledge applied to a new situation, but a new…

Throughout the life span, we are capable of representing quantities in the absence of language, or nonsymbolically. Additionally, over the course of development, we learn many symbolic measurement systems for representing quantities such as time and number. Despite substantial evidence of a relation between the acquisition of symbolic and…

This study investigated the extent to which people can develop a global representation of local environments through across-boundary navigation. Participants learned objects' locations in two misaligned rectangular rooms in an immersive virtual environment. After learning, they adopted a local view in one room and judged directions of objects…

Task design is an important element of effective mathematics teaching and learning. Past research in mathematics education has investigated task design in mathematics education from different perspectives (e.g., cognitive and cultural) and offered a number of (theoretical) frameworks and sets of principles. In this study, through a narrative…

Morphological knowledge is known to be positively associated with reading ability. However, whether morphological knowledge affects children's learning of new orthographic representations is less clear. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate morphological effects on orthographic learning in English, and whether this effect, if any, is different…

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused…

According to the seductive details (SD) effect, interesting, but irrelevant information in learning materials reduces learning outcomes. Basic research suggests that subjects in positive mood are more distractible by task-irrelevant stimuli than subjects in negative mood. Hence, mood could moderate the SD effect. We tested this assumption by…

Investigating task-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) interaction has increasingly received scholarly attention. However, studies have focused on negotiation of meaning and the quantity, focus and resolution of language related episodes (LREs). This study aims to broaden our understanding of the role of audio, video, and text…