Naturalistic language learning is contextually grounded. When people learn their first (L1) and often their second (L2) language, they do so in various contexts. In this dissertation I examine the effect of various contexts on language development. Part 1 describes the effects of textual, linguistic context in reading. I employed an eye-tracking…

Most Taiwanese English language learners have been exposed to traditional approaches to acquiring English as a second or foreign language. Studies demonstrate current/traditional teaching practices are not the most effective for struggling English language learners, and the rate of improvement has been limited. Therefore, this study explores…

Children who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/HH) present with specific challenges in language acquisition and literacy learning. For these children, developing age-appropriate language and literacy skills is often the exception, not the rule. This study defines the complex problem of disproportionate language and literacy acquisition and…

When learning a language, typically-developing infants face the daunting task of learning both the sounds and the meanings of words. In this dissertation, we focus on a source of variability that complicates the one-to-one relationship between words and their meanings: wordform variability. In Chapter 1 we make a distinction between the micro…

Describing events may be challenging for any child, but children who use communication aids may face unique linguistic, pragmatic, and strategic challenges in conveying information with the communication means they have available. This study explores strategies used by young, aided communicators when describing the content of a video unknown to…

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

D/deaf children of Deaf parents reportedly begin learning finger-spelling as young as thirteen months old, but deaf children born to hearing, nonsigning parents lack natural access to the native (spoken) language of their families, often exhibiting later language development. Forty-four deaf adults participated in a fingerspelling test of…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) emphasizes that state and local education agencies (SEAs/LEAs) must provide sufficiently trained staff so that English learners have equal opportunities for attaining English language proficiency and academic achievement across content areas without being "unnecessarily" segregated from non-ELs, thus…

The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…

The present article aims to shed light on the relationship between priming and creativity throughout Chinese children's ontogenetic development. It has been suggested that priming in naturalistic interaction occurs not as an exclusively implicit phenomenon. New methodological desiderata beyond traditional acceptability judgments have been…

Children with disabilities and special needs make up the vast majority of those currently being adopted internationally into the United States (U.S.). China has been a leading sending country for international adoption since the 1990s and remains one of the few nations with thousands of orphaned or abandoned children, many with congenital…

Dual language learners are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. student population, and the majority speak Spanish as a first language. This graduate-level textbook--now in its third edition--gives future speech-language pathologists the comprehensive knowledge they need to work effectively with Spanish-English bilingual children and support…

One of the main purposes of learning Bahasa Indonesia is to make students be fluent in using language. Language skills consist of two receptive skills (listening and reading), and two productive skills (speaking and writing). Those four skills are expected to be practiced equally. However, based on the previous research, listening lessons were…

This article provides background on the major perspectives involving the development of English language and literacy with respect to the evolving demography of d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing children and adolescents. It synthesizes research and controversies on the developmental similarity hypothesis--that is, whether the acquisition of English…

Phonological processes result in surface variants of the same words across phonological contexts, posing potential word learning challenges for children. Mandarin tone sandhi is a tonal process changing Tone 3 (T3) in different tonal and syntactic contexts, resulting in allophonic variants of T3 in connected speech. Previous studies found that…