Studying the oral language growth of Spanish-speaking preschoolers in the United States is increasingly important given the critical role early language development plays in reading outcomes. In this article, we report on the Spanish and English growth trajectories observed in 124 bilingual preschoolers collected over 2 years in 36 classrooms…

Parents are encouraged to read to their children as early as possible. Multiple studies of parent-child shared book reading with children ages 3 years and older have shown positive outcomes on parent use of language-based strategies and child language development. However, few studies have included children under the age of 3; thus, little is…

The use of discourse markers, like that of any other linguistic element, is dependent on contextual factors that interact at the specific moment of an enunciation. The utterers, with the need to adjust their language product to their communicative intentions, perform an analysis of the contextual, material, and relational factors involved,…

Introduction: The present research aimed to review the qualitative aspects of communication between children and their caregivers. We focused on the presence of quality indicators, on the strategies we encounter in influencing language acquisition in the interaction between children and early childhood educators. Methods: We examined the…

The purpose of this dissertation is three-fold: to further the understanding of grammar learning strategies (GLS) that students at an American university use when they engage in language study sessions on their own, in technology-enhanced language learning (TELL) outside of the classroom; to examine how previous language learning experience (PLLE)…

There is a growing body of research from various perspectives in heritage language (henceforth HL) acquisition as an emerging field. Some studies proposed that HL acquisition is a differential acquisition compared with the baseline language (i.e., the language spoken by the parents or caregivers) (Kupisch & Rothman, 2018; Dubiel &…

Paradoxes are particularly problematic in literacy as they often complicate learning. However, identifying and examining them can also tell us something about the inherent problems within social, political, and educational systems. This paper reports on an analysis of a total of 205 AJLL articles and editorials, published between 2011 and 2021.…

The problem addressed by this study was children's impeded oral language development when parents do not engage them in frequent conversational exchanges during the infant and toddler years. The purpose of the study was to explore parent behaviors and perceptions. Two questions guided the study: when do parents talk with their children? and how do…

Ambridge argues persuasively for the importance in language learning of a rich database of input exemplars. However, a fuller account must also consider the importance of on-line and developmental competition between rote exemplar-based storage and emergent patterns that can optimize retrieval. [For Ben Ambridge's "Against Stored…

Over the last decade, iterated learning studies have provided compelling evidence for the claim that linguistic structure can emerge from non-structured input, through the process of transmission. However, it is unclear whether individuals differ in their tendency to add structure, an issue with implications for understanding who are the agents of…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children with cochlear implants (CwCIs) constitute a heterogeneous population. A multitude of factors influence their spoken language development. There is evidence that CwCIs follow similar trajectories in language development as typically developing (TD) children but there is a lack of research on specific types of…

In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. This process of early phonetic learning has traditionally been framed as phonetic category acquisition. However, recent studies have hypothesized that the attunement may instead reflect a perceptual space learning process that does not…

Background: Despite accumulated evidence that language development depends on basic cognitive processes, the balance in contributions of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills to language abilities is still underexplored. Little is known about which cognitive measures best predict the degree of severity in children with language disorder (LD).…

This article aims to explore the conditions for children's language and literacy learning in 153 Swedish preschools with children one to five years. The Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS-3) is used to evaluate preschool quality, focusing on the subscale of Language and literacy activities. The study draws on Bronfenbrenner's…

Second language proficiency may be related to first language acquisition (Ganschow & Sparks, 1991), but relatively little is known about the relation between first and second language grammatical proficiency in primary school children who are in their first stages of foreign language learning. This study aims to determine whether differences…