This article presents a cross-cultural comparison of the size and composition of the expressive vocabulary of young children speaking two dialectal varieties of South American Spanish. Ninety-one Peruvian and 91 Argentinian toddlers (mean age: 22.5 months), matched on gender, age and maternal education, were assessed through the respective…

In English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication, in which English is used as a common language among interlocutors of different first languages, successful communication often features communication strategies that enhance mutual understanding and relationship management. Although prior research suggests that including such strategies in English…

Purpose: This study examines intraword variability in 40 typically developing French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6-4;8 (years;months). Specifically, it measures rate of intraword variability and investigates which factors best account for it. They include child-specific ones such as age, expressive vocabulary, gender,…

Purpose: Children with poor language tend to have worse psychosocial outcomes compared to their typically developing peers. The most common explanations for such adversities focus on developmental psychological processes whereby poor language triggers psychosocial difficulties. Here, we investigate the possibility of shared biological effects by…

This study focused on the analysis of the presentation of sources of culture in a series of English Textbooks used in Thailand and their presentation in the receptive skills and productive skills of language learning. It was revealed that source culture or Thai culture and international culture or culture of the foreign countries where English is…

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

Purpose: We examined indices of narrative microstructure as metrics of language development and impairment in Arabic-speaking children. We examined their age sensitivity, correlations with standardized measures, and ability to differentiate children with average language and language impairment. Method: We collected story narratives from 177…

Writing involves a number of skills and being self-directed in the process would contribute to greater effectivity. The concept of autonomography, or being self-directed in terms of writing, draws from the literature on self-directed learning and specifically self-directed writing, where concepts such as self-regulation and learner autonomy are…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

This article describes the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms, the first published instruments for the assessment of language development in EP-learning infants and toddlers. Normative data from the EP population are presented, focusing on developmental trends for vocabulary learning, production…

This paper is an attempt to study empirically a sample of spoken narratives of Hindi, Telugu and Dakkhini speakers in the multilingual setting of Hyderabad. After a brief account of multilingualism and variation within a language as commonly occurring phenomena, the paper examines the spoken narratives of the three languages mentioned above with a…