The present study investigates bilinguals' capacity to rapidly establish memory traces for novel word forms in a second language (L2), as a function of L2 linguistic proficiency. A group of Chinese-English bilinguals with various English proficiency levels were presented with a reading-aloud task, consisting of 16 pseudowords and 16 English words…

We investigated indexical variation as a variable that promotes second language (L2) vocabulary learning across language modalities. In three experiments, we presented Catalan Sign Language signs (Experiments 1a and 1b), pseudowords (Experiment 2), and English words (Experiment 3) to participants in three conditions that varied in the number of…

Recent studies have suggested that language aptitude is a domain-general and flexible trait to acquire foreign languages, regarding various cognitive abilities such as memory systems as its crucial components. Despite a growing interest in working memory, however, much remains unknown about the impact of associative memory on language aptitude.…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

In order to inform English foreign language (EFL) diagnostic assessment of literacy, this study examined the extent to which 175 first-language Hebrew-speaking EFL young learners from fifth to tenth grade exhibited differences in single-letter grapheme recognition, sub-word, and word reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and…

Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of mand, tact, and native-to-foreign (NFI) and foreign-to-native (FNI) intraverbal training on the acquisition of a foreign language. We used a multiple-baseline design across participants with an embedded adapted alternating treatments design to compare the effects of mand training, tact…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Purpose: We compared novel word learning in 2nd-grade children with typical development who were Spanish-English bilinguals to English monolinguals to understand word learning in bilingual children. Method: Children (monolinguals n = 167, bilinguals n = 76) engaged in 5 computer-based tasks that assessed word learning in 6 different contexts. The…

This study investigates the probable effect of a digital game-based vocabulary learning (DGBVL) task on the acquisition of some components of a word knowledge framework. In so doing, 124 Persian speakers (56 males and 68 females) were randomly assigned to either a control or an experimental group. The experimental group participants completed a…

Models of reading development point to a role for knowledge about the orthography quite late in children's reading development; here we explore the contributions of early orthographic knowledge -- of the features of print -- to word reading development between kindergarten and Grade 1. We did so in a longitudinal study of 93 emergent bilingual…

Stereotypical notions and depictions of the German language, its speakers, and cultural practices are more persistent in instructional materials, language program advertisements, and people's minds than one might presume (Bryant et al., 2019; Chavez, 2020a, 2020b; Rothe, 2022). Overcoming such misconceptions requires educators to reconsider…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of single-language and conceptual scoring on the vocabulary performance of bilingual children with and without specific language impairment. We assessed classification accuracy across 3 scoring methods. Method: Participants included Spanish-English bilingual children (N = 247) aged 5;1 (years;months) to…

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…