Early language competence is a reliable and powerful predictor of children's success in school, and word gaps linked to socioeconomic status disparities have cascading effects on academic outcomes. While early research -- such as the work of Hart and Risley (1995) -- focused on gaps in vocabulary, growing evidence reveals wide gaps in syntax as…

Mixed languages like Media Lengua incorporate grammar from one source language (here, Quichua) but lexicon from another (here, Spanish). Due to their linguistic profile, they provide a unique window into bilingual language usage and language representation. Drawing on sociolinguistic, structural and psycholinguistic perspectives, the current…

The present experiments focused on how orthographic processing develops during reading acquisition. Specifically, a large, cross-sectional sample of children from grade 2 to grade 4 was exposed to pairs of words, pseudowords, digit strings, and pseudo-letter (Armenian) strings while their sensitivity to transpositions (T) and substitutions (S) of…

While recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2-5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational…

Foreign-accented speech is generally harder to understand than native-accented speech. This difficulty is reduced for non-native listeners who share their first language with the non-native speaker. It is currently unclear, however, how non-native listeners deal with foreign-accented speech produced by speakers of a different language. We show…

The present study aimed to investigate whether well-established associations between action and language can be altered by short-term upper limb immobilization. The dominant arm of right-handed participants was immobilized for 24 hours with a rigid splint fixed on the hand and an immobilization vest restraining the shoulder, arm, and forearm. The…

This article discusses the phenomenon of task-based language teaching (TBLT) in instructed additional language settings. It begins from the premise that, despite considerable theoretical and empirical support, TBLT remains a contested endeavour. Critics of TBLT argue that, particularly with regard to time-limited foreign language instructional…

In the present study, we compared the processing of both conventional and novel metaphors by deaf versus hearing young adults. Eighteen deaf participants with severe-to-profound hearing loss and 18 controls matched for age, sex, and years of education were presented with word pairs of 4 types (literal, conventional metaphors, novel metaphors, and…

In research on language development by bilingual children, the early language environment is commonly characterized in terms of the relative amount of exposure a child gets to each language based on parent report. Little is known about how absolute measures of child-directed speech in two languages relate to language growth. In this study of…

This study aimed at examining context effects of processing science terminology in Chinese during the reading process. The science texts were first chosen, and then they were replaced by science terminology with familiar words; other common words remained in both texts. The results implied that readers spent longer rereading durations and total…

Previous event-related potential (ERP) work has indicated that the neural processing of action sequences develops with age. Although adults and 9-month-olds use a semantic processing system, perceiving actions activates attentional processes in 7-month-olds. However, presenting a sequence of action context, action execution and action conclusion…

Purpose: Maturation of neural processes for language may lag in some children who stutter (CWS), and event-related potentials (ERPs) distinguish CWS who have recovered from those who have persisted. The current study explores whether ERPs indexing semantic processing may distinguish children who will eventually persist in stuttering…

The online processing of both music and language involves making predictions about upcoming material, but the relationship between prediction in these two domains is not well understood. Electrophysiological methods for studying individual differences in prediction in language processing have opened the door to new questions. Specifically, we ask…

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., "The student is going to the library to borrow a..."), followed by the predictable word ("book"), a word that was form-related…

Kevin M. Roessger is an assistant professor of adult and lifelong learning at the University of Arkansas. He teaches courses in all areas of adult learning and development. His research interests include behavioural analytic approaches to skills-based learning and reflection as a natural phenomenon. Current conceptualisations of reflection have…