Naming semantically related images results in progressively slower responses as more images are named. There is considerable documentation in adults of this phenomenon, known as cumulative semantic interference. Few studies have focused on this phenomenon in children. The present research investigated cumulative semantic interference effects in…

The present study examined the relationship between age of acquisition (AoA) and bilingual development for native Chinese children who learned English as a foreign language. A composite test measuring different aspects of language and cognitive skills in Chinese and English was administered on 85 Chinese native primary schoolers, who received…

The goal of this intensive longitudinal study was to trace the developmental trajectories of infant pointing production, through consideration of the modality (i.e. pointing alone vs pointing-vocal coupling) and the communicative intention (i.e. imperative vs declarative). Multilevel analysis was used to model the normative trend and the…

Pedagogical practices that are effective in content courses are often effective in CLIL courses too, yet one such practice -- content compression -- is generally neglected. Content compression is the purposeful reduction of the content to be taught; however, the CLIL literature often warns against the reduction and simplification of content for…

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of…

Language learning is an important developmental experience for young children during their preschool years, and book reading is an important context for promoting this growth. Book reading introduces children to a wider range of words than is evident in typical conversations and provides meaningful opportunities to practice using new words in…

Children often hear many new words in one conversation, and yet word learning research overwhelmingly focuses on how children learn and retrieve the meanings of single words. The current experiment tests how the number of labeled objects affects preschoolers' novel word referent selection immediately after encoding and after a one-week delay.…

The acquisition of verb morphology is often studied using categorical criteria for determining the productivity of a morpheme. Applying this approach to Japanese, an agglutinative language, this study finds no consistent order for morpheme acquisition and that productivity could be explained by sampling effects. To examine morpheme acquisition…

In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner's confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner's linguistic input. Crucially,…

Pedagogical reforms, specifically, the Thematic Curriculum and the Local Language Policy, have failed to improve literacy in Uganda despite a concerted effort from the Government of Uganda and its international development partners. This paper distills the major literacy programs used to scale up the reforms nationwide and summarizes what they did…

This study explores the literacy and social practices of a young Omani emergent bilingual child who is beginning to develop bilingualism and biliteracy in Arabic and English through social interactions. One case study of a four-year-old child and her family living temporarily for her father postgraduate studies in Canada is presented. Framed on…

Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…

This study aims to 1) explore the listening challenges of high- and low-proficiency EFL accounting undergraduates, 2) compare listening challenges and listening strategies between high- and low-proficiency learners and 3) investigate the effectiveness of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) in developing EFL-listening skills. The participants…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings faced significant disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic, compromising the continuity, stability and quality of provision. Three years on from the first UK lockdown as pandemic-era preschoolers enter formal schooling, stakeholders are concerned about the impact of the disruption on children's…

Many people consider the Internet to be refreshingly democratic; everybody appears to have a 'voice,' and there is much sharing of 'open' content. The use of the internet for the learning/teaching of languages often seems particularly apt: People from different countries practice a language as they interact online, at the same time deepening their…