Prioritizing vocabulary for instruction is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) research. Several word lists have been created to serve different needs, with many of them being restricted to a basic classification as general, academic, and technical words. Although discipline-specific vocabulary lists are useful for particular…

It is widely acknowledged that the acquisition of vocabulary is the foundation of learning English. With the rapid development of information technologies in recent years, e-learning systems have been widely adopted for English as a Second Language (ESL) Learning. However, a limitation of conventional word learning systems is that the prior…

Purpose: This study examines the expressive language and speech of twins, relative to singletons, at 3 and 5 years, with the aim of determining if a twinning effect occurs during this developmental period. The possibility of twins outgrowing a twinning effect was investigated. Method: A weighted population-based sample of 185 twins and 1,309…

Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation…

This paper examines how WhatsApp can be used to build learning communities and facilitate interaction, through the lens of Ubuntu -- an African concept of humanness, which means that an individual person owes his or her existence to the existence of others. The Afrocentric concept of Ubuntu and interaction work concomitantly towards the…

We examined the lexical and grammatical skills of monolingual and bilingual school-age children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Thirteen monolingual and thirteen bilingual children with ASD without intellectual disability, were compared on standardized measures of vocabulary and morphology. Findings revealed that bilingual children performed…

Single word items have usually been the unit of analysis for measuring L2 learners' vocabulary size, for designing word lists and for estimating word coverage of reading texts. However, what is lost in these estimates is the consideration of multiword expressions, such as idioms. To empirically test the assertion that the knowledge of single word…

Purpose: The purpose of our study was to test the hypotheses (a) that children with dyslexia have spoken word learning deficits primarily related to phonology and (b) that children with dyslexia and concomitant developmental language disorder (DLD) have word learning deficits related to both phonology and semantic processing when compared to peers…

Purpose: Vocabulary intervention should be guided by information from outcome measures that demonstrate whether the student has grown in depth or breadth of understanding of the taught words. However, there is a paucity of tools, to measure depth of vocabulary knowledge, that are available for clinical use. Method: The challenges of vocabulary…

Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine whether college students build their vocabularies by playing a serious game that incorporates principles of learning and memory. Design: This study used a single-site, prospective, randomized trial with 2 branches--immediate and delayed treatment. Outcome measures were obtained after a 1-month…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with deficient comprehension of figurative language and, specifically, idioms. Theories ascribe this to deficits in specific abilities (e.g., Theory of Mind [ToM]; executive functions [EF]; general language skills), but no comprehensive theory has resulted. This study investigated the differential…

Phonological selectivity is a phenomenon where children preselect which target words they attempt to produce. The present study examines selectivity in the acquisition of complex onsets and codas in English, and specifically in the acquisition of biconsonantal (CC) clusters in each position compared to triconsonantal (CCC) clusters. The data come…

Object names are a major component of early vocabularies and learning object names depends on being able to visually recognize objects in the world. However, the fundamental visual challenge of the moment-to-moment variations in object appearances that learners must resolve has received little attention in word learning research. Here we provide…

This article addresses the importance of teaching controversial issues, especially within elementary school contexts. In particular, the article explores the underlying elements of justice within controversies and demonstrates the way in which teachers might explore procedural justice within an elementary classroom.

Purpose: Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic…