Individual difference factors of personality typology and learning style preference and their effect on second language acquisition have been the focus of several prominent SLA theorists over the past twenty-five years. However, few articles have demonstrated how individual learner difference research can be applied within a classroom by second…

This work investigates the developmental aspects of the duration of point vowels in children with normal hearing compared with those with hearing aids and cochlear implants at 4 and 5 years of age. Younger children produced longer vowels than older children, and children with hearing loss (HL) produced longer and more variable vowels than their…

This article describes a procedure to aid in the clinical appraisal of child speech. The approach, based on the work by Dinnsen, Chin, Elbert, and Powell (1990; Some constraints on functionally disordered phonologies: Phonetic inventories and phonotactics. "Journal of Speech and Hearing Research", 33, 28-37), uses a railway idiom to track gains in…

From a dynamic systems perspective, transition points in development are times of increased instability, during which behavioral patterns are susceptible to temporary decoupling. This study investigated the impact of the vocabulary spurt on existing patterns of communicative coordination. Eighteen typically developing infants were videotaped at…

The processes of infant word segmentation and infant word learning have largely been studied separately. However, the ease with which potential word forms are segmented from fluent speech seems likely to influence subsequent mappings between words and their referents. To explore this process, we tested the link between the statistical coherence of…

It is well established that monolingual preschoolers' oral language development (vocabulary and oral comprehension) contributes to their later reading abilities; however, less is known about this relationship in bilingual populations where children are developing knowledge of two languages. It may be that children's abilities in one language do…

Young children develop the skills necessary for communication in infancy. Interactions with family members and other caregivers nurture and support those skills. Spoken (expressive) language progresses rapidly after a child's first word. A typical 2-year-old has an expressive vocabulary of approximately 150-300 words. Around this time, as they…

The present study investigated the language development of 50 children with intellectual disabilities (ID) and 42 typically developing children from age 4 to 5 years, and was designed to shed more light on the respective roles of phonological working memory (WM) and nonverbal intelligence in vocabulary and syntax development. Results showed that…

Very little is known about the neural underpinnings of language learning across the lifespan and how these might be modified by maturational and experiential factors. Building on behavioral research highlighting the importance of early word segmentation (i.e. the detection of word boundaries in continuous speech) for subsequent language learning,…

This study examined relationships between prelinguistic variables from the MacArthur-Bates CDI and the development of language comprehension and production in children with autism. Forty-four children were assessed at baseline and 6, 12, 24, 33 and 53 months later. Growth Curve Modeling was used to examine the extent to which three composite CDI…

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs ("lay/stand a bottle on a table") to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents ("nikka…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we neuroimaged deaf adults as they performed two linguistic tasks with sentences in American Sign Language, grammatical judgment and phonemic-hand judgment. Participants' age-onset of sign language acquisition ranged from birth to 14 years; length of sign language experience was substantial and…

Bilinguals appear to have shared syntactic representations for similar constructions between languages but retain distinct representations for noncognate translation-equivalents (Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007). We inquire whether bilinguals have more integrated representations of cognate translation-equivalents. To investigate…

It is widely recognized that the processor has a key role to play in creating and strengthening the mapping between form and meaning that is integral to language use. Adopting an emergentist approach to heritage language acquisition, the current study considers the extent to which the operation of the processor can contribute to an account of what…

This study investigated the relations among preschool teachers' behavior management, children's task orientation, and children's emergent literacy and language development, as well as the extent to which task orientation moderated the relation between teachers' behavior management and children's emergent literacy and language development.…