Purpose: Despite the considerable scientific interest in researching the reading skills of the deaf population, most of these studies focus on reading comprehension (RC) at the word or sentence level. Such reading activates different underlying language processes than text-level reading, which is more akin to real-life reading literacy. The…

The current study is an exploration of the association between the characteristics of students' written compositions and their reading comprehension performance. We address the empirical question about the degree to which writing is predictive of reading comprehension by comparing the utility of several popular written composition metrics. These…

Understanding factors that influence reading achievement among bilingual children is considerably more complex than it is for monolingual children. Research on dual language development indicates that bilingual children's oral language abilities are often distributed across languages in varied ways, due to heterogeneity of dual language exposure…

The study examined storytelling prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in retelling a story) and the relation with oral language in Taiwanese preschool children. One hundred and twenty-eight preschool children aged 4 and 5 were recruited and given the following tasks: nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, syntax, and storytelling prosody. Children's…

Recent studies have found correlations between sentence-level tests and reading comprehension. However, the task demands of sentence-level tests are not well understood. The present study investigated syntactic knowledge as a construct by examining the convergent and discriminant validity of two sentence-level tasks, sentence comprehension and…

The contribution of linguistic skills to reading has been reported in different languages; however, this contribution varies according to the specific features of each language. Arabic is characterized by diglossia, i.e. the existence of two distinct varieties: Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA). This study examined the extent to which…

This study presents a corpus-based investigation of self-repairs in hearing adult L2 (M2L2, second modality and second language) learners of Swedish Sign Language ("Svenskt teckenspråk," STS). This study analyses M2L2 learners' STS conversations with a deaf signer and examines the learners' self-repair practices and whether there are…

Purpose: Language difficulties are prevalent among children born preterm. Existing studies have largely used standardized language tests, providing limited scope for detailed descriptive examination of preterm language. This study aimed to examine differences in conversational language between children born < 30 weeks and at term as well as…

Purpose: Transcription of conjoined independent clauses within language samples varies across professionals. Some transcribe these clauses as two separate utterances, whereas others conjoin them within a single utterance. As an inquiry into equitable practice, we examined rates of conjoined independent clauses produced by children and the impact…

Background: Early and effective treatment for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is important. Although a growing body of research shows the effects of interventions at the group level, clinicians observe large individual differences in language growth, and differences in outcomes across language domains. A systematic…

Sustained attention (SA) and short-term memory (STM) contribute to language function in Down syndrome (DS). We proposed models in which relations of SA to language in DS are mediated by STM. Thirty-seven youth with DS aged 10-22 years (M = 15.59) completed SA, STM, and language tasks. Cross-sectional mediation analyses were run with the…

Current models of the affinity between syntax and vocabulary are complex and recognize the contribution of bootstrapping and computational processes. To date, the mutual facilitation between these two constructs over time has not been studied in second language (L2) school children. The present study investigated longitudinally the direction and…

Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children's picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which…

Developing effective aptitude test batteries for conference interpreting is highly relevant for China given its large and fast-growing interpreting trainee population. This paper reports on the aptitude tests implemented to 23 first-year students at a CIUTI member and UN MOU university in China. We compared the validity of recall, a test commonly…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…