Statistical learning refers to the ability to identify structure in the input based on its statistical properties. For many linguistic structures, the relevant statistical features are distributional: They are related to the frequency and variability of exemplars in the input. These distributional regularities have been suggested to play a role in…

Word frequencies in natural language follow a highly skewed Zipfian distribution, but the consequences of this distribution for language acquisition are only beginning to be understood. Typically, learning experiments that are meant to simulate language acquisition use uniform word frequency distributions. We examine the effects of Zipfian…

This dissertation outlines a program for the theory of phonotactics--the theory of speakers' knowledge of possible and impossible (or likely and unlikely) words--and argues that the alternative view of phonotactics as stochastic, and of phonotactic learning as probabilistic inference, is not capable of accounting for the facts of this domain.…

In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a…

Purpose: To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children…

Background and Context: Vygotsky's sociocultural theory emphasises the importance of language, mediation, and the transfer of skills and knowledge from the social into the cognitive plane. This perspective has influenced the development of PRIMM (Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify, Make), a structured approach to teaching programming. Objective:…

How do responsive adult-child interactions influence early language development? How do a child's language skills develop in tandem with social-emotional development, executive function, and literacy? What are effective ways to help parents support their child's development? Uncover the answers to these questions in this fascinating book, which…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Parents play a crucial role in shaping children's emergent literacy through shared book reading. Shared book reading can foster literacy acquisition, promote vocabulary development, and improve print awareness, phonological awareness, and story comprehension (e.g., Bus et al., 1995; De Temple & Snow, 2003; Mol et al., 2008; Snow et al., 1998).…

In Romanian preschool settings, there is a tendency to use abstract strategies in language-learning activities. The present study explored if strategies based on an embodied cognition approach facilitate learning more than traditional strategies that progress from concrete to abstract. Twenty-five children between 4 and 5 years of age listened to…

This study applies the Mathematics Acquisition Framework (MAF) (Bossé, Ringler, Bayaga, Fountain, & Young, 2018) to investigate fifth- through seventh-grade students' comprehension of fractions and decimals and examines how students build understanding of mathematical principles and concepts regarding fractions and decimals. Based on case…

The topic of play and development has been of immense importance and controversy in early education and child development field throughout the twentieth century and into the present decade. The trend of current early education is to introduce academics sooner for younger students in order for programs to remain competitive and have parents choose…

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (non-word repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6-8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and…

The purpose of the study is to reveal the effect of cooperative learning on language skills in an English course. The study was carried out for 5 weeks with 66 students studying at the 10th grade at an Anatolian high school in the district of Karade niz Eregli in Zonguldak during the fall term of the 2015-2016 academic year. The design of the…

The primary purpose of the present study was to test language and cognitive predictors of lexical selection in the storytelling of monolingual and bilingual children. Measures of language proficiency and cognitive ability were assessed with both English- and Mandarin-speaking monolinguals and Mandarin-English bilinguals aged 4 to 6 years old. To…