The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense…

The aim of this research was to analyze the use of iconicity during language acquisition of Israeli Sign language and spoken Hebrew. Two bilingual-bimodal infants were observed in a longitudinal study between the ages of 10-26 months. I analyzed infants' production of iconic words, signs, and gestures. The results showed that infants' use of vocal…

Background: One of the most significant developmental accomplishments is the emergence of language in early childhood. Whilst this process is effortless for most children, others can face significant hurdles. Identifying, in the early years, which children will go on to have developmental language disorder is, however, fraught with several…

Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative…

The article investigates how linguicism, racialisation and ethnicisation interconnect in a non-formal adult education setting, a non-governmental integration initiative targeting parents of small children in Sweden. Through ethnographic research at two sites where meetings were held, and a theoretical framework of combining raciolinguistic and…

Developmental psychology focuses on how psychological constructs change with age. In cognitive development research, however, the specifics of this emergence is often underspecified. Researchers often provisionally assume linear growth by including chronological age as a predictor in regression models. In this work, we aim to evaluate this…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots, with their ability to engage in conversations that resemble human interactions, have been increasingly applied to language teaching. Most recent review studies overlook student learning outcomes and the methods to achieve these outcomes in chatbot-supported language learning. Activity Theory (AT) offers a…

Purpose: The present study explored the extent to which early prelinguistic communication skills predict expressive language in toddlers with autistic siblings (Sibs-autism), who are known to be at high likelihood for autism and language disorder, and a comparison group of toddlers with non-autistic older siblings (Sibs-NA). Method: Participants…

Background: Vocabulary learning is an essential dimension of foreign language learning. The learners have a huge responsibility in this task. Among other factors, time constraints and an overall lack of maintained motivation on the part of students makes it especially challenging. Consequently, improving vocabulary learning requires strategies to…

This paper discusses a study that considered how the quality of three different learning environments, indoor classrooms, outdoor classrooms and forest schools, for children aged 3-5 years, is associated with the quality of their utterances. Adopting a theoretical framework of interactionism it was found that, within the study settings (n = 4),…

Since the beginning of the 21st century, heritage language studies have drawn unprecedented attention from language-related research areas. Despite the flourishing research on heritage language learning, relatively few studies have examined the motivational profiles of L1 English speakers engaged in heritage language learning. Theoretical…

Five-to-six-year-olds' abilities to detect and solve ambiguities in spoken language have been found to be a predictor of their later reading abilities in first-to-third grade. However, the origins of this relationship remain unclear. Success in ambiguity detection may be reflective of overall language attainment, which varies with socioeconomic…

In urban, industrialized cultures, the best predictor of how children acquire their native language is child-directed speech from adults. However, in many societies, children are much less exposed to such input. What has remained unexplored is the impact of another type of input: other children's speech. In cross-cultural head-turn experiments, we…

Children who receive cochlear implants develop spoken language on a protracted timescale. The home environment facilitates speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the environment differs between children with cochlear implants and typical hearing. We matched eighteen preschoolers with implants (31-65 months) to two groups of…

Extensive research has shown that children's early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. Abstract word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with…