Background: Children's language abilities set the stage for their education, psychosocial development and life chances across the life course. Aims: To compare the efficacy of two preschool language interventions delivered with low dosages in early years settings (EYS): Building Early Sentences Therapy (BEST) and an Adapted Derbyshire Language…

Background: Augmented reality (AR) emerges as a technology with considerable promise and substantial potential for pedagogical integration within language education contexts. However, there remains a scarcity of review studies exploring the best practices and principles for oral communication facilitation based on robust theoretical models or…

Background: The article critiques the monoglossic ideologies that dominate current educational practices in South Africa, which often marginalise indigenous African languages and fail to facilitate the dynamic multilingual realities of learners. It examines the impact of English language pedagogies in multilingual settings, particularly in South…

Large language model (LLM)-based conversational agents (CAs), with their advanced generative capabilities and human-like conversational interfaces, can serve as reading partners for children during dialogic reading and have shown promise in enhancing children's comprehension and conversational skills. However, there is limited research on the…

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of young children's language learning in pre-primary and primary education. It collates research to date on language development and pedagogy among children learning a language in addition to their home language(s) in instructional settings, providing readers with a thorough understanding of the…

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were…

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like…

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have smaller vocabularies in infancy compared to typically-developing children. To understand whether their smaller vocabularies stem from problems in learning, our study compared a prospective risk sample of 18 elevated risk and 11 lower risk 24-month-olds on current vocabulary size and…

Young children struggle more with mapping novel words onto relational referents (e.g., verbs) compared to non-relational referents (e.g., nouns). We present further evidence for this notion by investigating children's extensions of noun-noun compounds, which map onto combinations of non-relational referents, i.e., objects (e.g., "baby"…

This study examined the development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional narratives using a storytelling/story-acting practice where children told stories to and for their friends. Evaluative language orients the audience to the teller's cognitive and emotional engagement with a story's events and characters, and we hypothesized…

Individual differences in infants' native phonological development have been linked to the quantity and quality of infant-directed speech (IDS). The effects of parental and infant bilingualism on this relation in 131 five- and nine-month-old monolingual and bilingual Spanish and Basque infants (72 male; 59 female; from white middle-class…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) classroom instruction that incorporates a principled approach into the use of the first language (L1) by students and instructors has an effect on beginning learners' development of L2 speaking and writing proficiency, compared to L2-only instruction, over the course of one semester.…

Purpose: Mean length of utterance (MLU) is one of the most widely reported measures of syntactic development in the developmental literature, but its responsiveness in young school-age children's language has been questioned, and it has been shown to correlate with nonsyntactic measures. This study tested the extent to which MLU shows measurement…

This study aims to place EFL learners along an affective continuum via machine learning methods and present a new dataset about affective characteristics of EFL learners. In line with the purposes, written self-reports of 475 students from 5 different faculties in 3 universities in Turkey were collected and manually assigned by the researchers to…

The aim of this research is to highlight didactical voices on inclusive ideals and special educational tools noted in the written reflections of 178 preschool teachers in 10 Swedish municipalities. The research questions are as follows: How do preschool teachers signify inclusive ideals in written reflections of teaching in language and…