The present study continues research that takes non-serious language more seriously (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005) by focusing on a central second language (L2) Metaphoric Competence factor, Metaphor Language Play (MLP). For willing learners, MLP offers a diversity of benefits (Bushnell 2009; Bell 2012a) despite being one of the most challenging…

In their first three years, children begin to maintain topics and add new information in conversation. In turn, caregivers create opportunities for language learning. Compared to children with no family history of autism (typical likelihood, TL), the younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at elevated likelihood (EL)…

Background and purpose of the study: STEM learning often involves a multitude of complex and abstract concepts and ideas that can be challenging for students to comprehend. Research suggests that the oral and visual representations in video lectures can maximize students' cognitive infrastructure, helping them to organize knowledge more…

In STEM hands-on learning activities, collaboration with group members can be a significant motivator for students' engagement. This research is based on the 6E Learning by DeSIGN™ model and explores the impact of incorporating reflective strategies on students' learning performance, motivation, and participation in collaborative STEM learning…

When the written language that children learn to read and write is distinct from the oral language they acquired as their mother tongue, they may encounter substantial challenges. The linguistic distance between two varieties of the same language could have an impact on the literacy acquisition journey. The present study focuses on Arabic, a…

This study examines the impact of instructor-led (IL) versus self-access (SA) web-based pragmatic instruction on novice second language learners' (n = 28) awareness and oral production of Spanish apologies. Two sections of a second-semester Spanish course were assigned to either the IL or the SA group. The web-based resource "Dancing with…

In early childhood classrooms, little time is spent writing (Gerde et al., "Early Childhood Research Quarterly," 31, 34, 2015), and students receive limited supports to enhance their writing skills (Bingham et al., "Early Childhood Research Quarterly," 39, 35, 2017). In early childhood, when students experience rich writing…

The association between decontextualized talk (DT; i.e., talk extending beyond immediate context) and child language outcomes is well-attested but not well-understood. This study tested the hypothesis that DT is more linguistically complex than contextualized talk (CT). Thirty-eight Norwegian children (M[subscript age] = 5.5 years; 25 girls; 30…

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning--the prior--and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a…

Challenges to verbal encoding may affect the ability of autistic individuals to express their ideas. Therefore, visuospatial expression may represent a person's knowledge and skills more accurately than spoken language. To test this hypothesis, we asked seven autistic adults to linguistically retell and visuospatially reenact several animated…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates. Method: Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants (M[subscript age] = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry,…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

In this theoretical review, evidence for the link between spoken and written word knowledge is summarised, highlighting the specific hypotheses posed in this field and the extent to which they are informative regarding causation. A brief overview of major theories of orthographic learning draws attention to how each characterises the role of oral…

Due to subjectivity in oral assessment, much concentration has been put on obtaining a satisfactory measure of consistency among raters. However, the process for obtaining more consistency might not result in valid decisions. One matter that is at the core of both reliability and validity in oral assessment is rater training. Recently,…

Stronger metacognition, or awareness and regulation of thinking, is related to higher academic achievement. Most metacognition research has focused at the level of the individual learner. However, a few studies have shown that students working in small groups can stimulate metacognition in one another, leading to improved learning. Given the…