Despite Australia's strong tradition of research on language maintenance and shift, little is known about the ways in which migrant background students continue to use their heritage languages in Australian schools. This paper presents an in-depth case study of students' linguistic practices at a multiethnic Melbourne high school, where over 95%…

The purpose of this study was to explore a new learning environment instrument which could be used by teaching practitioners and other educators to measure the language learning environment in the secondary science classroom. The science teacher is central in creating science classrooms conductive to the language needs of students and should be…

Morphological systems have been pivotal in exploring cognitive mechanisms of language use and acquisition. Adult English definite article form preference seems to depend non-deterministically on multiple factors. A corpus study of adult spontaneous speech revealed similar patterns of variability. In an experiment, article variant preferences of…

This article explores the theoretical framework upon which a democratic classroom is based, and the effects that a curriculum based on social justice has on English Language Learners (ELLs). Furthermore, it explores authentic means of assessing ELLs, in addition to other more traditional and standardized testing. In a social justice framework, all…

This body of evidence summary reports the results of the evaluation of technical evidence in support of the California English Language Development Test (CELDT), as analyzed against a validated list of technical adequacy criteria. The table presented in this paper outlines the types of validity, reliability, and bias and sensitivity evidence…

Purpose: In a landmark study, B. A. Wright et al. (1997) reported an apparent backward-masking deficit in language-learning-impaired children. Subsequently, the controversial interpretation of those results has been influential in guiding treatments for childhood language problems. This study revisited the temporal-masking paradigm reported by B.…

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but…

The picture-word interference paradigm was used to shed new light on the debate concerning slow serial versus fast parallel activation of phonology in silent reading. Prereaders, beginning readers (Grades 1-4), and adults named pictures that had words printed on them. Words and pictures shared phonology either at the beginnings of words (e.g.,…

Assessing whether domain-general mechanisms could account for language acquisition requires determining whether statistical regularities among surface cues in child directed speech (CDS) are sufficient for inducing deep syntactic and semantic structure. This paper reports a case study on the relation between pronoun usage in CDS, on the one hand,…

Human infants possess powerful learning mechanisms used for the acquisition of language. To what extent are these mechanisms domain specific? One well-known infant language learning mechanism is the ability to detect and generalize rule-like similarity patterns, such as ABA or ABB [Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Rao, S. B., & Vishton, P. M. (1999).…

Storytelling is perhaps the most powerful way that human beings organize experience. The practice is timeless and universal. Stories help everyone understand the world and make sense of their lives. Like adults, children use stories to process and reflect on their experiences. Recognizing and responding to the stories that infants and toddlers…

The abstractness of children's early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children's knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are…

Effects of object-name contiguity on word production were examined in 1 1/2- to 2-yr-old children. Two objects and two spoken names were presented in each of three experiments. Each object was the referent of 1 spoken name. An object was presented either together with its spoken name (modeling trial) or alone (test trial). Modeling trials and test…

We explore in this study how infants may derive phonetic categories from adult input that are highly variable. Neural networks in the form of self-organizing maps (SOMs; Kohonen, 1989, 1995) were used to simulate unsupervised learning of Mandarin tones. In Simulation 1, we trained the SOMs with syllable-sized continuous F[subscript 0] contours,…

The relationship between pre-school teachers and the children in their classrooms directly influences the degree of success the children experience in school and in life. The emphasis on quality pre-K education in the U.S. has resulted in an increased need for highly qualified teachers who are capable of engaging in meaningful interactions with…