Research Findings: This study examines the frequency of reasoning talk used by 56 educators during their naturally occurring play interactions with infants in their early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers. Using Hasan's semantic framework, reasons were coded as social (based on social rules) or logical (based on rules of nature). The…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to explain key concepts about vocabulary acquisition and instruction and to translate research from middle school vocabulary interventions into practice recommendations for practitioners. In this tutorial, we consider the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension, describe vocabulary…

Across languages, children produce locative "back" earlier and more frequently than "front," but the reasons for this asymmetry are unclear. On a "semantic misanalysis" explanation, early meanings for "front" and "back" are nonadult (nongeometric), and rely on notions of visibility and occlusion…

Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds' verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in…

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences affect semantic prediction. We assessed this by looking at two languages, Dutch and Turkish, that differ in word order and thus vary in how words come together to create sentence meaning. In an eye-tracking task, Dutch and Turkish four-year-olds (N = 40), five-year-olds (N = 58), and…

How to support students in programming learning has been a great research challenge in the last years. To address this challenge, prior works have mainly focused on proposing solutions based on syntactic analysis to provide students with personalized feedback about their grammatical programming errors and misconceptions. However, syntactic…

Students' ability to build knowledge, and transfer it within and between contexts is crucial to cumulative learning and to academic success. This has long been a concern of higher education research and practice. A central part of this concern for educators is creating the conditions that enable their students' deep learning, as this is an area of…

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed "Pursuit," uses an associative…

The episodic context account of retrieval-based learning proposes that retrieval enhances subsequent retention because people must think back to and reinstate a prior learning context. Three experiments directly tested this central assumption of the context account. Subjects studied word lists and then either restudied the words under intentional…

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual…

Analyses of learning based on student discourse need to account not only for the content of the utterances but also for the ways in which students make connections across turns of talk. This requires segmentation of discourse data to define when connections are likely to be meaningful. In this paper, we present an approach to segmenting data for…

Purpose: Current auditory training methods typically result in improvements to speech recognition abilities in quiet, but learner gains may not extend to other domains in speech (e.g., recognition in noise) or self-assessed benefit. This study examined the potential of training involving multiple talkers and training emphasizing discourse-level…

The present study aims to explore the semantic knowledge of a group of Iranian deaf individuals who, due mainly to auditory deprivation did not acquire language normally in early years of their life. The participants were ten deaf and a matched number of hearing individuals as control group. A test of five tasks was administrated to assess their…

How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4-year-old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verb learning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also…

Production studies show that both Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and bilingual children for whom Russian is a non-dominant language have difficulty distinguishing between the near-synonymous connectives "i" "and" and "a" "and/but." "I" is a preferred connective…