The current study investigated language development of children residing in institutional care (IC) in Russia, compared to peers raised by biological family care (BFC). We used standardized behavioral testing (Preschool Language Scale-5, McArthur CDI), and an event-related potential picture-word matching paradigm. Children in IC significantly…

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer-i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short…

As programming must be learned by doing, introductory programming course learners need to solve many problems, e.g., on systems such as 'Online Judges'. However, as such courses are often compulsory for non-Computer Science (nonCS) undergraduates, this may cause difficulties to learners that do not have the typical intrinsic motivation for…

The use of new digital formats in language learning and testing improves both the learning and acquisition skills development process of language tests. The process of listening comprehension is considered one of the most complex in the field of Computer Aided Learning Language (CALL) because it relates to multimodal learning channels and brain…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

Researchers are rarely satisfied to learn only whether an intervention works, they also want to understand why and under what circumstances interventions produce their intended effects. These questions have led to increasing calls for implementation research to be included in high quality studies with strong causal claims. Of critical importance…

Purpose: A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing…

It is well established that emotion is extensively influenced by language. However, previous studies mainly focus on the first language (L1) rather than the second language (L2). The current study explored whether L2 shapes emotion perception in masked priming paradigm by distinguishing emotion-label words (e.g. fear, pride) and emotion-laden…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

Over the last decade, there has been great research interest in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in various fields, such as medicine, finance, and law. Recently, there has been a research focus on the application of AI in education, where it has great potential. Therefore, a systematic review of the literature on AI in education is…

Listener background variables have been recognized as potential contributors to language evaluation bias. This continuum of trait-irrelevant factors creates implications from the L2 classroom to integration in the target language community. This study examined how L2 Spanish learners' listener background factors including ethnicity, heritage…

"Tender Shoots" compared two book-reading and conversation approaches for parents and preschoolers to an activity-based control group. The "Rich Reading and Reminiscing" (RRR) condition taught parents to converse about the storyline; the "Strengthening Sound Sensitivity" (SSS) condition taught parents to converse…

Rubric scoring has been gaining traction as an emergent method to assess spoken-language interpreting, with two of the most well-known methods being rating scale-based holistic and analytic scoring. While the former provides a single global score, the latter generates separate scores on different dimensions of interpreting performance. Despite the…

This article demonstrates how recent advances in technology allow fine-grained analyses of candidate-produced essays, thus providing a deeper insight on writing performance. We examined how essay features, automatically extracted using natural language processing and keystroke logging techniques, can predict various performance measures using data…

Little is explored regarding the modality-specific differences in recall abilities of preschool children. Understanding modality-specific differences in the recall at an early age might give an insight into age-linked trends, which can lay a foundation for later development. The current study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the…