This article presents a series of three experiments investigating the processing of nested epistemic expressions, utterances containing two epistemic modals in one clause, such as "he 'certainly may' have forgotten." While some linguists claim that in a nested epistemic expression one modal is semantically embedded within the scope of…

Despite the fact that in most communities interaction occurs between the child and multiple speakers, most previous research on input to children focused on input from mothers. We annotated recordings of Sesotho-learning toddlers living in non-industrial Lesotho in South Africa, and French-learning toddlers living in urban regions in France. We…

In Krashen's theory of second-language acquisition he claims that there is distinction between language acquisition and language learning, a distinction which other second-language acquisition researchers have called "perhaps the most important conceptualization" in the field and which has made possible the most productive models of SLA.…

Heritage language (HL) learning is often facilitated by consistent exposure to the HL in family language policy (FLP). However, when children develop a preference for the majority language, family members may negotiate their use of both languages to establish a stronger emotional bond with their children while providing rich HL input. This article…

Young children's language skills have a significant positive impact on their academic success throughout school, especially on reading and writing performance. The spread of COVID-19, which has resulted in lockdowns, fewer learning hours in kindergarten, and distance learning, might have affected children's exposure to learning opportunities. The…

In this study, 96 world language teachers in the state of Georgia completed a survey regarding their delivery of instruction in the target language. While ACTFL (2010, 2021) recommends using the target language 90% or more of the time to deliver instruction, only 20% of the world language instructors who were surveyed reported doing so. According…

Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit,…

We explored the role of parental testimony in children's developing beliefs about the ontological status of typically unobservable phenomena. US parents and their 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 25 dyads) separately rated their confidence in the existence of scientific and religious unobservable entities (e.g., germs, angels), and were invited to…

Parents play an important role in creating home language environments that promote language development. A nonequivalent group design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a community-based implementation of LENA Start™, a parent-training program aimed at increasing the quantity of adult words (AWC) and conversational turns (CT). Parent-child…

Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative "forms" with "meanings." One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use "and re-use" of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent…

Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic…

The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child-directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co-occurrence. Previous work using these models has not…

Construction Grammar has been a prominent framework in linguistic research for nearly three decades, attracting scholars from various disciplines, including language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. While considerable progress has been made in understanding the first language (L1) construction learning of various languages,…

Multimodal input can significantly support second language (L2) vocabulary learning and comprehension. However, very little research has examined how L2 learners, especially young learners, allocate attention when exposed to such input and whether learning from multimodal input can be explained by attention allocation. This study therefore…

High-quality oral language interventions support children's readiness for formal literacy instruction, and yet guidance for multilingual classrooms is not available. To address this gap, we drew on the empirical literature on linguistically diverse learners, classroom linguistic environments, and usage-based theories to identify principles for…