Deliberate vocabulary study has mostly been studied within a strictly experimental framework of learning and memorization. More ecologically valid investigations embedded in existing study contexts have been rare. This study fits into the latter paradigm, investigating how students attempted to learn 90 English words over a period of three weeks…

Many Western industrialized nations have high levels of ethnic diversity but to date there are very few studies which investigate prelinguistic and early language development in infants from ethnic minority backgrounds. This study tracked the development of infant communicative gestures from 10 to 12 months (n = 59) in three culturally distinct…

The aim of this study was to examine the developmental trajectories of comprehension of relational concepts among 557 participants with intellectual disability (ID) of undifferentiated etiology (M age = 12.20 years, SD = 3.18) and 557 typically developing (TD) participants (M age = 4.57 years, SD = 0.80). Logistic regression analyses, with…

Availability of orthography during word learning has been found to facilitate learning the word's spelling and pronunciation and has been proposed to facilitate learning its meaning. This has not been studied in second language (L2) learning yet, in which word learning often corresponds to translation learning. Therefore, an L2 word learning…

Young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present with a broad range of spoken language abilities, as well as delays in precursor skills such as gesture production and joint attention skills. While standardized assessments describe language strengths, the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (CSBS-DP) is a particularly robust…

Do parents fine-tune the MLU of utterances with a particular word as the word is on the verge of appearing in the child's production? We analyzed a corpus of spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads. The children were in the initial stages of their lexical development, and the parents' utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired…

Recent laboratory experiments have shown that both infant and adult learners can acquire word-referent mappings using cross-situational statistics. The vast majority of the work on this topic has used unfamiliar objects presented on neutral backgrounds as the visual contexts for word learning. However, these laboratory contexts are much different…

Teaching vocabulary is a big challenge for teachers, and also a huge difficulty for students is to remember the vocabulary items. The main purpose of this study is to create an enjoyable learning and teaching environment to help students revise certain vocabulary items and make students have fun by being creative. In that, memes are trendy…

Two commonly used test types to assess vocabulary knowledge for the purpose of reading are size and levels tests. This article first reviews several frequently stated purposes of such tests (e.g., materials selection, tracking vocabulary growth) and provides a reasoned argument for the precision needed to serve such purposes. Then three sources of…

Technology has become an integral part in language education in general and English language teaching and learning in specific. Accordingly, the use of technology enhanced language learning (TELL) tools in English language learning has become common as they can improve the knowledge retention and increase engagement. The study aims at unravelling…

Students commonly find specialist scientific language problematic. This study investigated developments in chemical language usage by six "non-traditional" students over the course of 1 to 4 years. The students participated in semi-structured interviews and were asked to explain specific chemical scenarios. Interviews were transcribed…

To help infer the meanings of novel words, children frequently capitalize on their current linguistic knowledge to constrain the hypothesis space. Children's syntactic knowledge of function words has been shown to be especially useful in helping to infer the meanings of novel words, with most previous research focusing on how children use…

While the significance of corpus-based research in the teaching of foreign language and native language is increasing, the need for such studies is also increasing accordingly. The priority of the vocabulary taught in language education are identified through corpus-based studies in line with the international criteria set in the relevant field.…

Across languages, children map words to meaning with great efficiency, despite a seemingly unconstrained space of potential mappings. The literature on how children do this is primarily limited to spoken language. This leaves a gap in our understanding of sign language acquisition, because several of the hypothesized mechanisms that children use…

In this article, we report on a cross-age peer learning program, the Martha's True Stories Reading Buddies program, focused on supporting the vocabulary and comprehension of multilingual learners and their peers in elementary school. We describe the principles of the program and provide information about our evaluation of the program. Then, we…