There has been extensive research in the last 20 years on the effectiveness of different instructional interventions and learning conditions on the acquisition of vocabulary. However, very few attempts have been made to explore how vocabulary knowledge develops over time. This paper argues for the need to conduct more longitudinal studies on…

One primary problem in extremely preterm children is the occurrence of atypical language development. The aim of this study was to explore the components of language (articulatory phonetics, lexicon and syntax) in comprehension and production in extremely preterm children between the 4th and 5th year of age. The language section of the Preschool…

Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's…

Previous studies have demonstrated an effect of early vocal production on infants' speech processing and later vocabulary. This study focuses on the relationship between vocal production and new word learning. Thirty monolingual Italian-learning infants were recorded at about 11 months, to establish the extent of their consonant production. In…

Purpose: The particular statistical approach researchers choose is intimately connected to the way they conceptualize their questions, which, in turn, can influence the conclusions they draw. One particularly salient area in which statistics influence our conclusions is in the context of atypical development. Traditional statistical approaches…

Sight word learning occurs in most early elementary classrooms. Some kindergarten students face the prospect of learning up to 100 sight words, and many teachers feel pressure to ensure that students know lists of words by the year's end. The authors offer five assertions about sight word learning to direct teachers and administrators toward the…

Verbs are often uttered before the events they describe. By 2 years of age, toddlers can learn from such an encounter. Hearing a novel verb in transitive sentences (e.g. "The boy lorped the cat"), even with no visual referent present, they later map it to a causative meaning (e.g. "feed") (e.g. Yuan & Fisher, [Yuan, S.,…

The authors develop the concept of teaching vocabulary for application (TVA) as a component of comprehensive vocabulary instruction. TVA is instruction that focuses on students' skillful application of small sets of words within academic tasks, such as text analysis and writing. The authors discuss how this instruction, with its extended focus on…

Background: The current study aims to address whether boys and girls learn words differently from shared reading of informational books, which are often perceived as 'boys' books'. Methods: Forty-five mother-child dyads (Mean age = 60.4 months, SD = 6.84) were video recorded reading sets of informational and narrative trade books at home.…

The New General Service List (NGSL; Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013b) was published on an interim basis in 2013 as a modern replacement for West's (1953) original General Service List (GSL). This study compared GSL and NGSL coverage of a 6-year, 114-million word section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and used COCA…

Knowledge of multi-word units (MWUs) helps facilitate communicative fluency, and research on them has gained more and more attention in recent years concerning teaching methods and designing materials for second language (L2) acquisition. Incidental and intentional vocabulary learning are two dominant approaches to acquiring MWUs. In lexical…

Background: Performance goal orientations are influential motivational factors for predicting learning performance. However, a lack of attention has been paid to investigating the effects of performance goal orientations on learning performance and in-game performance in the context of digital game-based learning. Objectives: This study…

Learning part names, such as hands of a clock, can be a challenge for children because of the whole object assumption; that is, a child will assume that a given label refers to the whole object (e.g., a clock) rather than the object part (e.g., hands of a clock). We examined the effect of gaze shifting and deliberate pointing on learning part…

This study aims to grow the literature by examining the "how" of disciplinary literacies (DL) elementary mathematics instructional practices in teacher education, which is under-reported. Using qualitative case study methods, we examined how one cohort of elementary preservice teachers (PTs) enacted the DL instructional practices in…

This study explored designing Augmented Reality (AR) based language learning materials from the perspective of 50 pre-service English teachers recruited based on convenience sampling. Using one group pre-test-post-test design, both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through pre- and post-surveys, and reflection form. According to the…