The basic timescales governing animal life are generally determined by body size. Pauses in naturally occurring human speech were investigated to determine if pause timescales are also sensitive to body size. Reported is an analysis of pause duration allometry in recorded interviews of 61 athletes. Pauses were divided into three classes based on…

Children with epilepsy are at increased risk for language and reading difficulties. Phonological processing and language underlie reading success, yet their association with reading achievement in children with epilepsy is unknown. We assessed phonological processing, oral language, and reading in children (ages 6 to 12) with epilepsy (EP; n = 6),…

In this study, we examined to what extent orthographic skills, phonological processing, oral vocabulary, and word memory accounted for variance in reading comprehension among upper-elementary school children with and without dyslexia. The tasks came from the Tests of Dyslexia (TOD). Data from 753 participants (typically developing n = 575;…

The relationship between foreign language anxiety (FLA) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) experienced during a creative collaborative oral English-as-a-foreign-language task, and the relationships between FLE/FLA and task speech fluency were investigated. The task was performed by mid-intermediate/high-intermediate English learners (N = 43) in…

Background: Research has demonstrated that distinct oral language skills contribute unique variance to text comprehension in students from second grade onward. This study examined these relationships for kindergarten students whose comprehension is often assumed to be determined by word decoding skills. Method: Eighty-eight kindergarten students…

Purpose: Treatment response is the degree to which an individual benefits from a treatment. This systematic review sought to identify and synthesize research evidence regarding individual characteristics that predict language treatment response among children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: To be eligible for inclusion,…

Purpose: Although children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are known to have difficulties with emergent literacy skills, few available studies have examined emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking children with DLD. Even though Arabic language characteristics, such as diglossia and orthographic structure, influence the acquisition…

Vocabulary is an important prerequisite for reading comprehension and therefore for learning in all subjects. For this reason, the present study examines digital context-based and explicit approaches to vocabulary promotion in an experimental intervention study in fourth grade. Furthermore, students' reading comprehension and intrinsic reading…

Learning to read is a fundamental skill that is understudied among children who hear more than one language at home. A particular limitation in the extant literature is that the samples are often Spanish-dominant and come from low-income households. This literature has evidence that Spanish skills -- both language-specific (i.e., vocabulary) and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the significance and directions of the relationships among oral and manual fine motor skills and language abilities among Spanish--English bilingual children. If such relationships exist, this would support a shared biological influence on motor and language development. Method: Participants…

This research study aimed to explore the speaking anxiety of Turkish learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and its relation to EFL speaking self-efficacy, fear of negative evaluation (FNE), self-perceived English speaking proficiency, and gender. 293 (132 females, 161 males) university-level EFL students completed the EFL speaking…

Oral language comprehension (OLC) and vocabulary depth are widely recognized as key predictors of reading comprehension. However, research has either provided a limited representation of OLC or failed to acknowledge the distinctive predictive nature of vocabulary depth. This study investigates the combined contributions of OLC, conceptualized as a…

Background: Linguistic comprehension and narrative skills encapsulate a complex array of grammatical and semantic skills that underpin complex reading comprehension processes. However, most research in this area has focused on children with reading difficulties and not on typically developing children. Also the research has mostly focused on…

Situated within the Simple View of Reading, this study examined the code-related (word reading) and oral language (receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, narrative production) skills that contribute to English and Arabic reading comprehension in two groups of Arabic-English bilingual children (7-9 and 10-12 years) living in an English…

Purpose: It is often assumed that phonological awareness only reflects children's phonological skill. However, orthographic representations have been found to be automatically involved during phonological awareness tasks, which we refer to as automatic orthographic activation. Although previous longitudinal neural studies have addressed how…