Background: Reading attitudes are recognised as an influencing factor on the language and literacy achievement of school age monolingual English-speaking children. The relationship between reading attitudes and achievement in young Spanish-speaking English Learners (ELs) remains understudied. Purpose: The aim of the current study was to describe…

Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and…

Biology courses have thousands of words to learn in order to intelligently discuss the subject and take tests over the material. Biological fluency is an important goal for students, and practical methods based on constructivist pedagogies can be employed to promote it. We present a method in which pairs of students write dialogues from…

We investigated the effectiveness of using constant time delay (CTD) with young adults with intellectual disability on their vocabulary acquisition and retention, as well as expository reading comprehension. Four learners, ages 19 to 21 years, from a postsecondary education program for individuals with disabilities participated in the study.…

Parents often turn to educators and healthcare professionals for advice on how to best support their child's language development. These professionals frequently suggest implementing the "one-parent-one-language" approach to ensure consistent exposure to both languages. The goal of this study was to understand how language exposure influences the…

Recognizing the importance of vocabulary for comprehension, Wilhelm asks two key questions: "which words do I teach and how should I teach them?" Through years of trial and error, Wilhelm has adopted these principles to answer "which words": teach "important" words students will see and use again; words necessary to conceptual understanding; words…

Three experiments ("N" = 130) used a minimal group manipulation to show that just perceived membership in a social group boosts young children's motivation for and learning from group-relevant tasks. In Experiment 1, 4-year-old children assigned to a minimal "puzzles group" persisted longer on a challenging puzzle than children identified as the…

Purpose: Vocabulary assessment holds promise as a way to identify young bilingual children at risk for language delay. This study compares 2 measures of vocabulary in a group of young Spanish-English bilingual children to a single-language measure used with monolingual children. Method: Total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary were used to…

The present study investigates whether four- and six-year-old children use pragmatic competence as a criterion for learning from someone else. Specifically, we ask whether children use others' adherence to Gricean maxims to determine whether they will offer valid labels for novel objects. Six-year-olds recognized adherence to the maxims of…

Children's assignment of novel words to nameless objects, over objects whose names they know (mutual exclusivity; ME) has been described as a driving force for vocabulary acquisition. Despite their ability to use ME to fast-map words (Preissler & Carey, 2005), children with autism show impaired language acquisition. We aimed to address…

It is not well understood how grammar emerges in very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) children. The main aim of the present study was to gain information on the emergence of grammar in this group at 2; 0. The Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory was used to collect data from VLBW children ("N" = 156) and full-term controls…

Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11-4 ;…

Using the Internet as a learning tool has great promise, but also poses significant challenges. Theories and research confirm the importance of students' engagement in self-regulated learning processes for effective Internet learning. In this article the Authors describe a structured think-aloud procedure intended to support students'…

This dissertation consists of three studies that investigate the extent to which speakers and listeners can and do plan ahead during production and comprehension. Study 1 investigates the attentional requirements of word selection. In two dual-task experiments, subjects categorized tones and then named pictures while word selection difficulty was…

Ubiquitous Learning Log (ULL) is defined as a digital record of what you have learned in the daily life using ubiquitous technologies. This paper focuses on how to capture learning experiences in our daily life for vocabulary learning. In our previous works, we developed a system named SCROLL (System for Capturing and Reminding Of Learning Log) in…