A selective literature review by Hall and Dills ([2020]. The Limits of "Communication Mode" as a Construct. "Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education.") (EJ1273461) recently argued that limitations in communication mode as a construct prevent empirical research from discovering what type(s) of early language input optimise…

The present study investigates the impact of meaningful input on L2 learners' vocabulary use and their fluency in oral performance (immediate and repeat tasks), as well as whether the effects are mediated by learners' prior vocabulary knowledge and working memory. Ninety university students learning English as a foreign language were randomly…

This article highlights the need for a new type of corpus that will combine both a learner and a pedagogic corpus. The need for such a type of corpus is underlined by the interaction between input and output and the expected impact of the former on the latter within all instructional settings. Such a corpus will allow us to collect data, including…

This study evaluates the potential for incidentally learning early reading vocabulary through the extensive viewing (EV) of children's movies/television with subtitles. Recent research has investigated how much exposure to important vocabulary EV and extensive reading (ER) provides. Investigations compute the number of repetitions of target…

Learning to walk allows infants to travel faster and farther and explore more of their environments. In turn, walking may have a cascading effect on infants' communication and subsequent responses from caregivers. We tested for an "inflection point"--a dramatic shift in the developmental progression--in infant communication and caregiver…

Diversity of vocabulary knowledge and quantity of language exposure prior to literacy are key predictors of reading development. However, diversity and quantity of exposure are difficult to distinguish in behavioural studies, and so the causal relations with literacy are not well known. We tested these relations by training a connectionist…

Fourteen-month-old infants are unable to link minimal pair nonsense words with novel objects (Stager & Werker, 1997). Might an adult's productions in a word learning context support minimal pair word-object association in these infants? We recorded a mother interacting with her 24-month-old son, and with her 5-month-old son, producing nonsense…

Purpose: Frequent sounds and frequent words are both acquired at an earlier age and are produced by children more accurately. Recent research suggests that frequency is not always a facilitative concept, however. Interactions between input frequency in perception and practice frequency in production may limit or inhibit growth. In this study, we…

The current study contributes to the argument regarding whether L2 learners up to advanced levels make agreement errors on grammatical gender. It reports gender agreement accuracy on a written Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) and an Elicited Oral Production Task (PDT) on known nouns assigned the correct gender by participants on a vocabulary…

Given the changing demographics of young children served by U.S. schools, educational equity practices must include ways of sustaining cultural heritage practices of children from ethno-linguistic, minoritized, and under-resourced communities. In the present study, we partnered with a bilingual Head Start serving mostly children of immigrant…

Listening comprehension is a real-time process, yet very little is known about the variables affecting real-time second language (L2) listening. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of syntactic complexity and word frequency on L2 listening. Furthermore, the role of the listener's working memory capacity in listening comprehension…

The purpose of this mixed-method study was two-fold. The first purpose was to investigate the role of using culturally-based materials on contributing to the advancement of oral communication of five EFL Arab college students through a six-week program. The second purpose was to explore the college students' views and experiences of using…

This study investigates the potential benefits for incidental vocabulary acquisition of implementing a particular sequence of input--output--input activities. More specifically, learners of English as a foreign language (EFL; n = 32) were asked to watch a TED Talk video, orally sum up its content in English, and then watch the video once more. A…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

Often, second/foreign (L2) language learners receive little opportunity to interact orally in the target language. Interactive, conversation-based spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that use automated speech recognition and natural language processing have the potential to address this need by engaging learners in meaningful, goal-oriented speaking…