The "International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation" series, or ICLDC, has, since its inception in 2009, become the flagship conference for the field of language documentation. Every two years, conference attendees gather at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa to share their experiences working on diverse topics…

One hypothesis to explain perceptual narrowing in speech perception is the distributional learning account. This account claims that both infants and adults are able to infer the number of phonemic categories through observations of frequency distributions of individual phones in their speech input (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002). Although the…

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is…

Speakers of many languages around the world rely on body-based contrasts (e.g., "left/right") for spatial communication and cognition. Speakers of Yupno, a language of Papua New Guinea's mountainous interior, rely instead on an environment-based "uphill/downhill" contrast. Body-based contrasts are as easy to use indoors as…

In language conferences, student papers, some linguistics textbooks, and wider culture, the critical period hypothesis is presented as factual despite still being fiercely debated in academic literature. The widespread popular acceptance of the hypothesis contrasts with a sharp debate and criticism of it in academic literature (Muñoz &…

Teaching science in an English-medium school where your students have a different mother tongue brings various issues to light. Our ultimate goal in teaching science is to help students understand the big ideas; however, poor language skills may make this hard and can lead to a heavy emphasis on "passing the exam at all costs" using rote…

Taking the former Yugoslavia and some of its successor states as a case study, this article examines the concepts of ethnicity and mother tongue (with a side glance at religion) as employed in recent population censuses. A special focus is on the sometimes considerable discrepancies between the ethnic and linguistic affiliations of the…

We present an artificial language experiment investigating (i) how speakers of languages such as English with two-way obligatory distinctions between singular and plural learn a system where singular and plural are only optionally marked, and (ii) how learners extend their knowledge of the plural morpheme when under the scope of negation without…

More than 50 years of research indicate that family engagement plays a critical role in supporting children's learning, encouraging grit, determination, and will to succeed. Moreover, findings show that when families are involved, children improve in a range of areas: better grades, higher scores on achievement tests, lower drop-out rates, regular…

Purpose: With an increasing emphasis on the reading development of L2 learners of English and a growing body of literature on L2 reading, it is now time to examine what the current research on L2 reading says about L2 learners' reading development and to discuss what would be a desirable future for L2 reading studies. Focusing on the L2 reading of…

The field of English language teaching and learning has long been full of a plethora of acronyms and terms. Those terms that relate to languages and users of languages that are not those privileged or dominant in any given context should be subject to particular scrutiny. The author argues that labels applied to individuals and less dominant…

This paper reports the findings of a case study investigating Grammar Translation Method (GTM) through mother tongue, much-isolated words, and putting words together in grammar class to scaffold students' learning. Mixed methods, classroom observations, field-notes and videotape recording, were employed to collect the data. The data gained, then,…

The study explored parents', teachers', and students' beliefs about the use and study of mother tongue (MT) in selected secondary schools in Akinyele Local Government Area, Oyo State, Nigeria. Descriptive survey design was adopted. Twelve public senior secondary schools were randomly selected. Purposive sampling technique was used to select at…

The present study examines a family language transmission project in which a child, learning Polish in Australia, created video documentaries with her own voice annotations in Polish. The project generated numerous parent-child interactions at the time of videorecording, a focus of the present study. The data in the study were seven…

This study, which was drawn from a larger published work, examined language proficiency and literacy skills predictive of learning content and function words via the commonly used practice of flashcard word reading, which tests word knowledge in isolation. The current study also investigated differences in word learning performance between…