Pierce "et al." (2017) have proposed that variations in the timing, quality and quantity of language input during the earliest stages of development are related to variations in the development of phonological working memory and, in turn, to later language learning outcomes. To examine this hypothesis, three groups of children who are…

This study examined accuracy on syllable-final (coda) consonants in newly-learned English-like nonwords to determine whether school-aged bilingual children may be more vulnerable to making errors on English-only codas than their monolingual, English-speaking peers, even at a stage in development when phonological accuracy in productions of…

Embracing an inclusive mindset within museums is necessary to further accessibility and transform the role of museums in a changing society to more effectively foster diversity. A brief overview of the history of laws related to people with disabilities and the role of centralized museum associations sets accessibility as a concept within cultural…

This longitudinal study tracked ten L1 English-speaking learners' acquisition of Spanish voiceless stops /ptk/ by measuring their voice onset time (VOT) over an academic year in two distinct contexts of learning. Living in a Spanish-speaking dorm, participants in the experimental group experienced a "domestic partial-immersion," in which…

Despite earlier claims that language abilities are intact in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), many studies have shown that language development is often delayed and atypical, that is, it develops in line with different cognitive abilities compared to typically developing populations. It is unclear, however, whether general cognitive…

We investigated how educators, mothers and children used temporal language in reminiscing and future talk conversations. Participants initially included 40 educator-younger child dyads (27-36 months) and 45 educator-older child dyads (48-60 months) from early childhood centres in Sydney, Australia. Educators were asked to nominate and discuss four…

With the advent of new technologies, assessment research has adopted technology-based methods to investigate test validity. This study investigated the neurocognitive processes involved in an academic listening comprehension test, using a biometric technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Sixteen right-handed university…

Second language (L2) learners make gender errors with possessive pronouns. In production, these errors are modulated by the gender match between the possessor and possessee noun. We examined whether this so-called match effect extends to L2 comprehension by attempting to replicate a recent study on gender predictions in first language (L1) German…

Evidence shows individual variation in lexical acquisition as a function of socioeconomic status and linguistic input. Research has primarily involved English-speaking populations and considered only mothers' child-directed speech. This study analyzes the effects of socioeconomic status on quantitative and qualitative properties of linguistic…

Cross-age studies have suggested that although children's notions of scientific phenomena change moderately with increasing age, certain misconceptions persist from preschool to a higher educational level. The purpose of this study was to diagnose the prevalence of selected misconceptions about the particulate nature of matter among preservice…

While it is well-established that nontraditional students are more likely to take online courses than their traditional-age counterparts, investigations of the learning equivalence between online and campus-based instruction typically fail to consider student age as a mediating factor in the learning experience. To examine learning outcomes as a…

Summer break sets students in grades K-12 back by at least one month of instruction and has the strongest impact on mathematics retention. This study investigates whether there is evidence of the summer gap effect at the university level for engineering students enrolled in the introductory calculus course sequence, and possible demographic…

The observed increase in economic inequality, where the major concern is relative to the huge growth of the highest incomes, motivates to revisit classical measures of inequality and to offer new ways to synthesize the variability of the entire income distribution. The idea is to provide policy makers a way to contrast the economic position of the…

This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

The foreign and second language (L2) learning process is shaped by a constellation of individual difference (ID) factors, some of which (e.g., age, anxiety, motivation, aptitude, learning styles, language learning strategies) have long been investigated by specialists, whereas others have only recently attracted their attention. One of such…