This article begins with two examples that demonstrate adult interactions with young learners during conversations in informal learning environments. Family visits to informal learning environments provide opportunities to learn together, interact, engage in conversations, and learn more about one another. This article explores family learning in…

Background: A requisite skill for successful conversation is the ability to adjust one's language according to contextual factors. Aims: This study examined one aspect of language use in context--the use of mental-state terms, i.e. words that communicate thoughts, beliefs or feelings--in conversations between adult males with and without traumatic…

Social support is protective for a variety of health outcomes, and individuals living outside their country of origin ("sojourners") might use social support in distinctive ways. The authors performed a confirmatory factor analysis of the 18-item Index of Sojourner Social Support (ISSS) using data obtained from 190 Spanish-speaking…

Purpose: Cross-linguistic cognates are words that share form and meaning in two languages (e.g., "helicopter-helicoptero"); translation equivalents are words that share meaning but not form (e.g., "house-casa"). Research consistently demonstrates a performance speed and/or accuracy advantage for processing cognates versus noncognates in bilingual…

This study explored Mandarin-speaking mothers' referential choice in relation to informativeness. The data consisted of two Mandarin-speaking mothers' natural conversation with their children, collected when the children were between the ages of 2;2 and 3;1. The subject and object arguments of the mothers' utterances were coded for the categories…

The aim of this study was to compare the prosodic profiles of English- and Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS), examining cross-linguistic differences. Two groups of children with WS, English and Spanish, of similar chronological and nonverbal mental age, were compared on performance in expressive and receptive prosodic tasks…

The study aimed at investigating the role of nominal gender in animal categorization in preschoolers. Given the regularities characterizing gender system, at both syntactical and morphological level, Italian language is suitable to address this issue. In three experiments, participants were asked to classify pictures of animals as male or female.…

This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether we employ the same normalisation mechanisms when processing words spoken with a regional accent or foreign accent. Our results showed that the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN) following the onset of the final word of sentences spoken with an unfamiliar regional accent was…

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic…

Purpose: The authors assessed adult selective auditory attention to determine effects of (a) differences between the vocal/speaking characteristics of different mixed-gender pairs of masking talkers and (b) the rhythmic structure of the language of the competing speech. Method: Reception thresholds for English sentences were measured for 50…

Purpose: The present study investigates the perception of phonological features in French-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) compared with normal-hearing (NH) children matched for listening age. Method: Scores for discrimination and identification of minimal pairs for all features defining consonants (e.g., place, voicing, manner,…

Socially withdrawn individuals display solitary behavior across wide contexts with both unfamiliar and familiar peers. This tendency to withdraw may be driven by either past or anticipated negative social encounters. In addition, socially withdrawn individuals often exhibit right frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry at baseline and when…

Previous research in the USA studying Spanish-English bilingual children's language development has largely focused on children's developing abilities in Spanish. However, relatively little research has been conducted on children's English grammatical development. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the English grammatical…

Social influences (e.g., by teachers, parents and peers) on students' experience of interest are typically described in terms of affecting students' initial choice of and/or completion of specific educational activities. When considered within the framework of the Self-Regulation of Motivation (SRM) model, however, other people may influence the…

Audiovisual speech perception was studied in adults with Asperger syndrome (AS), by utilizing the McGurk effect, in which conflicting visual articulation alters the perception of heard speech. The AS group perceived the audiovisual stimuli differently from age, sex and IQ matched controls. When a voice saying /p/ was presented with a face…