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,…

Purpose: Previous studies have reported the success of distributional learning for adult speakers across segmental and suprasegmental categories immediately after training. On the other hand, second language (L2) perception models posit that the ease with which learners perceive a nonnative speech contrast depends on the perceptual mapping between…

Learning new information constitutes a fundamental part of children's school years. Recently, studies have found beneficial effects of emotion on learning and memory. Here, we specifically examined the effect of positive emotional prosody on content learning in two groups of Swedish school children (ages 8-10 and 11-13 years). The participants…

Young children have an overall preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and its structural features are thought to facilitate language learning. Many studies have supported these findings, but less is known about processing of CDS at short, sub-second timescales. How do the moment-to-moment dynamics of CDS…

How does the emotional tone (happy or sad) and gender (male or female) of the instructor's computer-generated voice in a multimedia lesson affect learning processes and outcomes for female learners (Experiment 1) and male learners (Experiment 2)? In two experiments, college students viewed a 2.5 min narrated slideshow on the formation of lightning…

Self-regulation strategies and behaviors are important aspects of instrumental music learning because they allow students to set learning goals by testing and controlling their cognition, motivation, behaviors, and emotions. This work investigates the self-regulation processes of four young instrumentalists (aged 10-11 years) in their initial…

The aim of this study is to discuss the efficacy of questioning techniques of the teachers in the classroom. Proper questioning techniques are important in the teaching and learning process. Proper questioning techniques will make it easier for teachers to get feedback from students whether or not they understand the subject. This article…

Research on language learners' attention suggests that manipulating attention is beneficial in the language learning process as it facilitates the "noticing" of specific linguistic aspects. The current study investigated the effects of directing learners' attention to segments and prosody in English phonetic training. Korean learners of…

Computational models of child language development can help us understand the cognitive underpinnings of the language learning process, which occurs along several linguistic levels at once (e.g., prosodic and phonological). However, in light of the replication crisis, modelers face the challenge of selecting representative and consolidated infant…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Background: During grammatical treatment of children with developmental language disorder (DLD), it is natural for therapists to focus on the grammatical details of the target language that give the children special difficulty. However, along with the language-specific features of the target (e.g., for English, add -s to verbs in present tense,…

Despite the empirical evidence for the power of the cognitive capacity of implicit learning of structures and regularities in several modalities and materials, it remains controversial whether implicit learning extends to the learning of temporal structures and regularities. We investigated whether (a) an artificial grammar can be learned equally…

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied…

Millions engage in learning a Second Language (L2) using their mobile devices with a wide range of success. Concomitantly, there exists a growing interest in research on the effects of mobile-assisted language learning and predictors of learner outcomes (e.g., Loewen et al., 2020; Sudina & Plonsky, 2023). However, few of these apps and studies…

Despite the importance that learners must place on using prosody appropriately in EIL interaction, pragmatic functions of prosody have been largely disregarded in teaching materials and classroom instruction (Nikolic, 2018). Moreover, with a recent change in classroom paradigms instigated by the global development of educational technologies and…