The sources of knowledge that individuals use to make similarity judgments between words are thought to tap underlying phonological representations. We examined the effects of perceptual similarity between stimuli on deaf children's ability to make judgments about the phonological similarity between words at 3 levels of linguistic structure…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of photographs and assistive technologies for visual information processing as motivating tools for interpersonal communication of adolescents with Asperger Syndrome (AS), aged 16 to 18 years, attending special education school. Students with AS find it very difficult to create social and…

Executive control (EC) is related to mathematics performance in middle childhood. However, little is known regarding how EC and informal numeracy differentially support mathematics skill acquisition in preschoolers. A sample of preschoolers (115 girls, 113 boys), stratified by social risk, completed an EC task battery at 3 years, informal numeracy…

This research revealed both similarities and striking differences in early language proficiency among infants from a broad range of advantaged and disadvantaged families. English-learning infants ("n" = 48) were followed longitudinally from 18 to 24 months, using real-time measures of spoken language processing. The first goal was to…

General education teachers currently have children in their classrooms who are on the autism spectrum. These teachers have had little to no training in either their teacher preparation nor-school based professional development programs in teaching children on the spectrum. The purpose of this paper is to explore teaching strategies that are…

Against the background of the increasing number of multilingual children with atypical language development around the world, this study reports research results on grammatical word class processing involving children with specific language impairment (SLI). The study investigates lexical retrieval of verbs (through picture-naming actions) and…

Previous researchers have used stimulus preference assessment (SPA) methods to identify salient reinforcers for individuals with developmental disabilities including tangible, leisure, edible and olfactory stimuli. In the present study, SPA procedures were used to identify potential auditory reinforcers and determine the reinforcement value of…

This study surveyed the problems 213 university students confronted while viewing an online video-based English program. Data were collected through self-reports and one-to-one interviews. The content analysis approach was used. Totally, 18 problems were identified and categorized into three cognitive-processing stages: perception, parsing, and…

This article reports on an 8-week study that investigated the differential effects of two written corrective feedback (CF) options on 92 low-intermediate EFL students' explicit and implicit knowledge of English articles and the extent to which language analytic ability might influence the effect of written CF. The study used a…

Young children frequently tell visual stories, drawing pictures to record and share their thoughts, feelings and understanding. How and what young children describe through art, especially when written language is not an option, is the focus of this interpretive analysis. A series of pictures by John, a 6-year-old boy, were drawn across the…

Previous research has documented advantages and disadvantages of early bilinguals, defined as learning a 2nd language by school age and using both languages since that time. Relative to monolinguals, early bilinguals manifest deficits in lexical access but benefits in executive function. We investigated whether becoming bilingual "after"…

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal,…

Along with language teaching purposes, coursebooks also convey different kinds of cultural and social messages through both written texts and visualization. Therefore, studying coursebooks in terms of such qualities is necessary in foreign language education. In the learning process, visualization plays a pivotal role since visuals cater for…

Intercultural simulations, such as Barnga (Thiagarajan & Steinwachs, 1990), along with the use of critical incidents (Gibson, 2002; Gropper, 1996), have long been a mainstay of intercultural communication courses and have found their way into English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms (Apedaile &…

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic…