The present study examined whether syntactic comprehension constitutes a source of individual differences separate from vocabulary and of relevance to reading comprehension. One hundred and sixty-one Danish Grade 6 students completed multiple tests of syntactic comprehension, vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension. Syntax measures were…

Natural language is known to play a crucial and specific role for children's learning in school mathematics. Not only does it carry special vocabulary, but subtle differences between natural languages may lead to surprising challenges, for instance, for learners who are not taught mathematics in their mother tongue. In this paper, the…

Little evidence has been reported for narrative-related difficulties for Chinese Mandarin-speaking school-age children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This study aimed to capture the indices from narratives that can differentiate Chinese children with and without DLD. Oral narrative and written narrative samples were collected from…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the variations in vocabulary and syntax in Instagram posts relating to food among younger and older men and women in the United Kingdom. The study sought to determine if differences in these linguistic features would affect the expression of users on the platform, which was the dependent variable under…

The present study investigated the potential of writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) for language learning by manipulating cognitive task complexity based on related models and hypotheses. English essays written by 59 Chinese postgraduate EFL students from different subject areas were analysed with reference to writing complexity,…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is characterized by persistent and unexplained difficulties in language development. Accumulating evidence shows that children with DLD also present with deficits in other cognitive domains, such as executive functioning (EF). There is an ongoing debate on whether exclusively verbal EF abilities are…

Children's speech is influenced by the speech they hear, in particular by the parental speech addressed directly to them. The aim of this study was to analyse toddlers' speech with their parents and to investigate the influence of specific characteristics of child-directed speech on child speech in real time during mother-child and father-child…

Purpose: This study presents a comprehensive exploration of lexical and grammatical development in Palestinian Arabic (PA). The study aims to test the validity of the Palestinian Arabic Communicative Development Inventory (PA-CDI) as well as generate growth curves for lexical and morphosyntactic development, examine the order of emergence of both…

This study explores syntactic and lexical complexity in argumentative essays written by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Humans (HS). First year Tswana second language (L2) learners of English in a South African University wrote the HS argumentative essays. The AI essays have been generated by ChatGPT-3.5 on the same topics. Using a…

Background: Little is known about the spontaneous speech characteristics of young children with language delay in Mandarin, relative to their peers. Until the recent development of standardized language assessments normed in China on Mandarin-speaking children, it was difficult to independently identify atypically developing children to study…

This study investigates the evolution of reading comprehension abilities in Indonesian learners of the Chinese Heritage Language (CHL), by comparing their scores on the Chinese Proficiency Test, a test specifically designed for CHL learners. A total of 275 candidates, divided into early adolescent (M[subscript age] = 13.56), late adolescent…

Purpose: To avoid misdiagnosis with developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children, it is recommended to evaluate both languages. However, unlike their monolingual peers, bilingual children acquire their heritage language under adverse input conditions. Focusing on Levantine Arabic, the study evaluates the clinical utility of a…

Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the…

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…

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…