This dissertation research examines the acquisition of second language vowels. For second language learners, learning a new languages' sound inventory, particularly its vowels, presents a challenge perceptually and in terms of production. Incorrectly perceiving and producing sounds in a second language results in a foreign accent in many adult…

The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests…

This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech-language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Purpose: This study tested the feasibility of a method designed to assess children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., "Are the nice little dogs running?"). We expected that a group of children who were proficient in auxiliary use would show this sensitivity,…

This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The aim is to delineate how the linguistic and extra-linguistic context affects referent accessibility to the speaker. The study also examines…

Masked priming studies have shown that readers decompose morphologically complex words ("read+er"). Interindividual differences have been suggested to affect this phenomenon. However, its development is poorly understood. We addressed this issue by taking a longitudinal approach that allows greater rigor in establishing the relationship…

The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…

This study aimed to (1) evaluate the effects of an empathy education program, and (2) explore functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a potential empathy assessment tool. An empathy enhancement program for premedical students was developed. The Korean version of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Student version (JSE-S) and Interpersonal…

This study had 2 primary aims: (a) to investigate the concurrent links between preschool-aged children's theory of mind (ToM) and mental state talk at 55 months and (b) to examine the longitudinal associations between preschool-aged children's social understanding, as indicated by their ToM, and mental references, and their later social competence…

Impairment of motor learning skills in developmental coordination disorder (DCD) has been reported in several studies. Some hypotheses on neural mechanisms of motor learning deficits in DCD have emerged but, to date, brain-imaging investigations are scarce. The aim of the present study is to assess possible changes in communication between brain…

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3-5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell's (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years…

This paper reports on results of empirical research investigating written summaries of first-year Japanese university students, their task representations of summary writing, and the relationships between their representations and task performance. Data for this study were obtained by asking 108 students to read an English text and write a summary…

The RI-Val model of comprehension includes a validation process in which linkages formed by integration are matched against active memory. In five experiments, we investigated factors that influence validation. Reading times were measured on target sentences that contained either correct information or semantically related, but incorrect content.…

Purpose: This study investigates the interaction of language ability status, cultural experience, and nonverbal cognitive skill performance in Spanish-English bilinguals with typical development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: One hundred sixty-nine Spanish-English bilingual kindergartener's scores on the Symbolic Memory…