A premise of statistical learning research is that learners attend to and learn the frequencies of co-occurring sounds in the input, or phonotactic sequences. Inherent to the concepts of both frequency and phonotactics is order, or the temporal arrangement of the relevant elements. Order is similarly inherent to statistical learning, yet the…

Emotion and language are very common in young children's everyday lives. Hour by hour, they play, listen, vocalize, react, and emote. Despite the centrality of emotion and language to toddlers' local environments, the dynamic interplay of these communicative signals is practically unexplored. Here, we investigated how fluctuations in caregiver and…

Language is passed across generations through cultural transmission. Prior experimental work, where participants reproduced sets of non-linguistic sequences in transmission chains, shows that this process gives rise to two characteristic statistical properties of language that enhance its learnability: the statistical coherence of words and the…

Both classic thought experiments and recent empirical evidence suggest that children frequently encounter new words whose meanings are underdetermined by the extralinguistic contexts in which they occur. The role that these referentially ambiguous events play in children's word learning is central to ongoing debates in the field. Do children learn…

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Although the distinction between explicit and implicit (automatized) knowledge of second or foreign language (L2) is of crucial importance to second language acquisition (SLA) theory and research, it has thus far not been directly applied to L2 pronunciation. The paper attempts to fill this gap by making an initial attempt to illustrate the…

Previous research used the learning hierarchy (LH) as a heuristic to select reading interventions based on the level of accuracy defined as the percentage of words read correctly. The current study examined the validity of the LH by reporting the prevalence of reading profiles proposed by the framework: Acquisition phase--inaccurate and slow,…

Learning multiword expressions (MWEs) typically involves exposure to language input, such as through reading and listening. However, this way of learning can be rather slow. Therefore, finding strategies to enhance learning from input is crucial for language acquisition. In this study, 80 Iranian learners of English as a foreign language read…

Recent research highlights that external feedback alone does not lead to improvements unless students process and use it internally, emphasising the need to shift from a teacher-centred to a student-centred approach. While previous studies have underscored the importance of students generating feedback for their own use and explored effective…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the learning potential of French-speaking children, either with typical development (TD) or with developmental language disorder (DLD), when learning an invented inflectional morphological rule. We tested the children's performance in learning pseudomorphemes of gender and number with dynamic assessment…

As emotional factors gain increasing prominence in second language acquisition (SLA), few studies have offered a comprehensive bibliometric synthesis of this evolving research area. To address this gap, the present study analyzed 931 articles indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) from 2000 to 2024. A combination of bibliometric…

Although research indicates that deliberate practice is indispensable for achieving high levels of proficiency and expertise in a range of disparate fields, this type of practice has largely been overlooked in the second language acquisition literature. To bridge this gap, and advocating for a more intentional and goal-directed approach to second…

Human movement plays a foundational role in cognition and learning. This topical collection brings together theoretical and empirical work examining how gestures, physical activity, and virtual movement enhance learning in language, multimedia, and activity-based learning. Regarding language learning, interacting with virtual object improves…

Codeswitching is a common feature of bilingual language practices, yet its impact on word learning is poorly understood. Critically, processing costs associated with codeswitching may extend to learning. Moreover, verbs tend to be more difficult to learn than nouns, and the challenges of learning verbs could compound with processing costs…

This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit…