Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article-noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article-noun…

In light of mixed findings in existing input enhancement research, Issa and Morgan-Short in a 2019 article urged researchers to compare the relative effects of input enhancement that taps into learners' attention to the external format of second language (L2) target forms (e.g. through capitalizing or boldfacing the forms) and input enhancement…

Infants are immersed in a world of sounds from the moment their auditory system becomes functional, and experience with the auditory world shapes how their brain processes sounds in their environment. Across cultures, speech and music are two dominant auditory signals in infants' daily lives. Decades of research have repeatedly shown that both…

The introduction and a theoretical summary of language anxiety research (Chapter 1) are followed by four chapters: Chapter 2 presents a meta-analysis of the widely used "Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale"'s (Horwitz, et al., 1986) factorial structure; Chapter 3 reports on a validation study of the Hungarian version of MacIntyre…

Children acquiring Japanese differ from those acquiring English with regard to the rate at which verbs are learned (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993). One possible explanation is that Japanese caregivers use verbs in referentially transparent contexts, which facilitate the form-meaning link. We examined this hypothesis by assessing differences in verb…

For the past 25 years, researchers have investigated language input to children from high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Hart and Risley first reported a "30 Million Word Gap" between high-SES and low-SES children. More recent studies have challenged the size or even existence of this gap. The present study is a…

This article discusses research into the role of audio-visual input for second language (L2) or foreign language learning. It also addresses questions related to the effectiveness of audio-visual input with different types of on-screen text such as subtitles (i.e., in learners' first language) and captions (i.e., subtitles in the same language as…

Spoken language outcomes after cochlear implantation are highly variable. Some variance can be attributed to individual characteristics. Research with typically hearing children suggests that the amount of language directed to children may also play a role. However, several moderating factors may complicate the association between language input…

We select three word segmentation models with psycholinguistic foundations -- transitional probabilities, the diphone-based segmenter, and PUDDLE -- which track phoneme co-occurrence and positional frequencies in input strings, and in the case of PUDDLE build lexical and diphone inventories. The models are evaluated on caregiver utterances in 132…

There is a well-documented link between bilingual language development and the relative amounts of exposure to each language. Less is known about the role of quality indicators of caregiver-child interactions in bilingual homes, including caregiver input diversity, warmth and sensitivity. This longitudinal study examines the relation between…

Research on input processing and processing instruction has often employed a scoring method known as trials to criterion to observe the effects of instruction that emerge during training. Despite its common use in this research (see Fernández, 2021) this metric has never been evaluated critically. The present study first discusses several…

Debate around inflectional morphology in language acquisition has contrasted various rule- versus analogy-based approaches. This paper tests the rule-based Tolerance Principle (TP) against a new type of pattern in the acquisition of the possessive suffix -im in Northern East Cree. When possessed, each noun type either requires or disallows the…

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

Based on theories on vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, and reading comprehension subcomponents, ten attributes/subskills were defined for 50 items from relevant subtests of TEM4 (Band Four of Test for English Majors in China). Cognitive diagnosis was conducted on the TEM4 data of the randomly sampled 2285 examinees (roughly at the B2 level)…

Cross-situational word learning, the ability to decipher word-referent links over multiple ambiguous learning events, has been documented across development and proposed to be key to vocabulary acquisition. However, this work has largely focused on learning from one-to-one structure, where each referent is consistently linked with a single label.…