Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global and local aspects of lexical diversity in three…

Choosing which words to teach is a key consideration for language teachers and materials writers. Some studies have shown that teaching words in semantically related clusters can make learning more difficult. However, others argue it is the physical similarity of the referents of words that causes confusion. Importantly, studies have employed…

This longitudinal study investigated parents' different pretend play behaviors (substitution, animation, and role enactment) to their infants during free play and the bidirectional links with infants' vocabulary development at 14 months (Time-1: N = 34, M[subscript age] = 14.23 months) and 20 months (Time-2: N = 34, M[subscript age] = 20.33…

Background: Reading comprehension is an interactive process. Yet, instructional needs are usually identified with isolated componential tests. This study examined whether a dynamic approach, in which componential abilities are measured within the same text and global text comprehension is facilitated via feedback, can help in understanding…

Qiqiao songs, originating from the Qiqiao Festival, celebrate the annual meeting of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl and serve as vessels of cultural storytelling, rich in linguistic structures and moral teachings. The objective of this research is to explore the educational potential of Chinese Qiqiao songs as tools for literacy, with a specific…

Purpose: The integration of mobile technology in ESL/EFL contexts has garnered significant attention from contemporary researchers, teachers, and learners due to the advancements in technology, dynamic features, and multimodal applications. With this growing interest, there is a need to synthesize the existing literature and identify current…

Although many studies on early childhood have been conducted, there is still a need for further research on numeracy and vocabulary skills, particularly in Indonesia. This research aims to confirm the correlation between numeracy and vocabulary skills in preschool children and to disentangle the effects of environmental factors on both numeracy…

Pacifier use during childhood has been hypothesized to interfere with language processing, but, to date, there is limited evidence revealing detrimental effects of prolonged pacifier use on infant vocabulary learning. In the present study, parents of 12- and 24-month-old infants were recruited in Oslo (Norway). The sample included 1187 monolingual…

Multi-accent environments offer rich but inconsistent language input, as words are produced differently across accents. The current study examined, in two experiments, whether multi-accent variability affects infants' ability to LEARN WORDS and whether toddlers' prior experience with accents modulates learning. In Experiment 1,…

Picture book reading is widely regarded as an activity that promotes multiple aspects of children's language acquisition, including their vocabulary development. Historically, researchers interested in what underlies the link between picture book reading and vocabulary development have investigated a suite of caregiver behaviors during picture…

Background: The purported reciprocity between motivation and academic achievement in education has largely been supported by correlational data. Aims: Our first aim was to determine experimentally whether motivation and achievement are reciprocally related. The second objective was to investigate a potential behavioural mediation pathway between…

Examining changes in the longitudinal relationship between vocabulary knowledge and three types of morphological awareness (MA), a cross-lagged design was conducted with a sample of 146 Chinese children. Homophone awareness, homograph awareness, compounding awareness, and vocabulary knowledge were measured in grades 1 (T1), 2 (T2), and 3 (T3),…

Previous research suggests that exposure to accent variability can affect toddlers' familiar word recognition and word comprehension. The current preregistered study addressed the gap in knowledge on early language development in infants exposed to two dialects from birth and assessed the role of dialect similarity in infants' word recognition and…

Interactive book reading (IBR) as a context for vocabulary learning is studied widely in preschool children and kindergarteners. In the present study, we elaborate on this prior research by investigating the effects of a five-week IBR intervention on first graders' expressive target vocabulary growth. A repeated measures design with two…

This study aims to assess the overall impact of vocabulary development interventions on cognitive vocabulary outcomes. To achieve this, 43 theses on vocabulary teaching, each involving a specific intervention, were analyzed using meta-analysis. The findings from the meta-analysis, based on the random effects model, indicated that the average…