Purpose: Pragmatic language difficulties have been documented as part of the FMR1 premutation phenotype, yet the interplay between these features in mothers and the language outcomes of their children with fragile X syndrome is unknown. This study aimed to determine whether pragmatic language difficulties in mothers with the "FMR1"…

In this article, we explore the meanings of literacy, and more specifically of reading, in the Mexican context from a sociocultural perspective and as a social practice, underlining the technologies, competence, knowledge, beliefs, and values that permeate literacy use. We consider the historical, cultural, and multilingual specificities of…

As emotional intelligence contributes extensively in people's lives, it can also find some significance in language teaching. From this perspective, it is inevitable for teachers to know how to improve students' emotional intelligence. This paper made an effort to provide procedures to develop emotional intelligence. Although success has various…

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however,…

One of the most enduring questions in the field of bilingualism is whether bilingual infants and children initially have one language system or two. Research with adults indicates that, while bilinguals do not represent their languages in two fully encapsulated language systems, they are able to functionally differentiate their languages. This…

We examined the impact of simultaneous bottom-up visual influences and meaningful social stimuli on attention orienting in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Relative to typically-developing age and sex matched participants, children with ASDs were more influenced by bottom-up visual scene information regardless of whether…

This article presents an experimental study to investigate whether subtitle reading has a positive impact on academic performance. In the absence of reliable indexes of reading behavior in dynamic texts, the article first formulates and validates an index to measure the reading of text, such as subtitles on film. Eye-tracking measures (fixations…

The "Given-before-New" principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of subject-to-subject raising (StSR) in English. The goal is twofold: to determine whether StSR predicates that permit experiencers (1) are delayed relative to those which do not (2), and to link the acquisition of StSR to that of other A-movement structures. (1) William seems (to Leonard) to be…

This article reviews research that has investigated the role of verbal working memory (VWM) in sentence comprehension in both typical and atypical developmental populations. Two theoretical approaches that specify different roles for VWM in sentence comprehension are considered: (i) capacity-limit approaches, which treat VWM as a theoretical…

Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. "Journal of Memory and Language," 62, 67-82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order "n"-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about…

In this paper we present three design principles of language--experience, heterogeneity and redundancy--and present recent developments in a family of models incorporating them, namely Data-Oriented Parsing/Unsupervised Data-Oriented Parsing. Although the idea of some form of redundant storage has become part and parcel of parsing technologies and…

Limited word production may be the first indicator of impaired language development. The unavailability of normative data and standardized assessments for young Maltese children hinders the identification of early language delays. This study aimed to document Maltese children's expressive vocabulary growth and accompanying range of variation, to…

Background: Toddlers who are late talkers demonstrate delays in phonological and lexical skills. However, the influence of phonological factors on lexical acquisition in toddlers who are late talkers has not been examined directly. Aims: To examine the influence of phonotactic probability/neighbourhood density on word learning in toddlers who were…

The current study investigated the interaction of implicit grammatical gender and semantic category knowledge during object identification. German-learning toddlers (24-month-olds) were presented with picture pairs and heard a noun (without a preceding article) labeling one of the pictures. Labels for target and distracter images either matched or…