Most second language acquisition (SLA) research has documented the processes involved in learning second/foreign languages, with few studies focusing on the durability of attained second language (L2) skills once instructed learners/users are no longer receiving formal instruction. The current study examines the effects of continued exposure and…

Purpose: The lexical selection hypothesis posits that first words added to a toddler's spoken vocabulary will be predominantly those beginning with early developing consonant phonemes. Using this framework, we evaluated the relationship between word form and lexical selection among late talkers and two typical comparison groups. Method: An online…

Purpose: Children who have late language emergence, or are late talkers (LTs), have substantially lower vocabulary levels than their peers, on average. Notably, differences in how researchers define "who" comprises LTs can lead to inconsistencies across findings. The current study examined how the number of children identified as LTs…

Analogies of the juridical in the technical sphere allow conceptualizations of how our designs do justice to the language abilities being measured, facilitating improvement of the planned arrangements we make. Juridical anticipations within the technical sphere function on the norm side of the latter as requirements to correct aberrations in…

Infants are sensitive to statistics in spoken language that aid word-form segmentation and immediate mapping to referents. However, it is not clear whether this sensitivity influences the formation and retention of word-referent mappings across a delay, two real-world challenges that learners must overcome. We tested how the timing of referent…

Background: Pictures drawn by people with aphasia (PWA) are often more challenging to understand than those drawn by healthy people. There are two types of objects: those that tend to be drawn symbolically (symbolically drawn objects--SOs) and those that are likely to be drawn realistically (realistically drawn objects--ROs). Aims: To compare the…

Phonological awareness is taught from preschool onwards because of its impact on later reading skills. Numerous assessments and training sessions are available to guide childcare professionals. Most of them offer phonological sessions based on the use of pictures or visual aids. However, only few studies have shown the benefits of using this type…

Ecological momentary assessment has been increasingly used in autism studies over the last decade to capture and understand autistic people's behaviours, thoughts, feelings and daily experiences. This systematic review synthesised previous autism ecological momentary assessment studies to learn about the feasibility of ecological momentary…

The quantifier "some" often elicits a scalar implicature during comprehension: "Some of today's letters have checks inside" is often interpreted to mean that not all of today's letters have checks inside. In previous work, Goodman and Stuhlmüller (G&S) proposed a model that predicts that this implicature should depend on…

Statistical learning (SL), the ability to detect and extract regularities from inputs, is considered a domain-general building block for typical language development. We compared 55 verbal children with autism (ASD, 6-12 years) and 50 typically-developing children in four SL tasks. The ASD group exhibited reduced learning in the linguistic SL…

This study explored the influence of the dynamic assessment of human--computer interactive games on children's language potential. Thirty-seven special children aged 3--7 years were selected to participate in the study. They were divided into three groups according to their scores on the Autism Behaviour Checklist: (1) a non-autism group, (2) a…

Recent studies indicate children who are deaf and hard of hearing who use cochlear implants or hearing aids know fewer spoken words than their peers with typical hearing, and often those vocabularies differ in composition. To date, however, the interaction of a child's auditory profile with the lexical characteristics of words he or she knows has…

Research examining relations between language skills and social competence has yielded mixed findings. Three meta-analyses investigated links between language skills (overall, receptive, and expressive) and social competence in 2- to 12-year-old children. Data from 130 studies representing 62,120 children (M age at language assessment = 4.70…

The aim of this study was to examine the gender differences among EFL diploma students in grammar based on an English achievement test. This study was motivated by the observed challenges Saudi students face with mastering grammar, a crucial element of English proficiency that forms the basis of all four aspects of language: listening, speaking,…

Purpose: Pronouns stitch together discourse by linking referents within and across sentences. Previous research has shown that people often rely on two strategies to interpret pronouns: the subject bias (assuming the pronoun refers to the subject of a prior sentence) and the repeated mention bias (assuming it refers to a person that was mentioned…