The positive turn in SLA (MacIntyre at al., 2016) has sparked growing interest in the relationship between positive affective variables and language learning outcomes. Foreign language enjoyment has garnered particular attention as a positive emotion supporting language learning behaviors and achievement. However, within psychology and cognition,…

In today's globalised and networked life ecologies, the language socialisation and literacy experiences of children around the globe are increasingly multilingual. Children encounter new languages early on in kindergarten and school and many children speak home languages other than the community language. Science and education have a joint…

This narrative literature review explores language as a precursor for developing children's psychosocial skills in war-torn areas. By utilising Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, this study aimed to understand the lifelong consequences of early childhood language deprivation in war-stricken zones, thus suggesting intervention strategies to…

Background: Infants born preterm are at high risk of facing difficulties with acquiring speech, language and communication skills. Research on the direct benefits of parent--infant communication in neonatal units is limited. This study recognises that although neonatal nurses regard early communication as important, there is scope to develop a…

Story-time serves as an interactive linguistic tool through which parents encourage their children to share narratives. Grounded in sociocultural and narrative theories, this study employed a visual ethnographic approach to explore how parents perceive and engage in story-time interactions within 33 Chinese families. Data were collected through…

This meta-analysis included 27 empirical studies to explore the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) as well as the moderating effects of a number of variables. The comparison of 64 effect sizes from 2,637 participants indicated significant variability between the independent samples. The overall results showed that the…

Computational thinking (CT) has emerged as a foundational skill for young learners, preparing them to navigate and contribute to an increasingly digital world. This bibliometric analysis utilizes 374 articles from the Web of Science database to explore the research landscape surrounding CT in children's learning, focusing on its applications in…

This study investigated developmental pathways between early language and later social skills in a large, prospective cohort consisting of 3387 mother-child dyads. Mediational pathways were examined between parent-reported expressive language (at 2 years of age) and social skills (at 8 years of age), via core language and pragmatic language (at 5…

Factors which impact bilingual language development can often interact with different language features. The current study teases apart the impact of internal and external factors (chronological age, length of exposure, L2 richness, L2 use at home, maternal education and maternal L2 proficiency) across linguistic domains and features (vocabulary,…

Derrida's autobiographical and philosophical text 'Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin" is a partial recounting of his own childhood and upbringing in Algeria at a time when it was a colony of France. It is on one level a reflection on matters related to colonialism, and especially on the effects of the imposition of…

Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows…

Toddlers vary widely in the rate at which they develop vocabulary. This variation predicts later language development and school success at the group level; however, we cannot determine which children with slower vocabulary development in the second year will continue to have difficulty. In this article, I argue that this is because we lack…

Within second language acquisition research, L2 development has been traditionally analyzed through the dimensions of Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency (CAF) (Larsen-Freeman, 2009; Ortega, 2003; Skehan, 2009). Complexity within the CAF framework has gained the most attention and has often been examined through measures associated with clausal…

Children's ability to recognize object shape is foundational for successful early word learning. However, the prototypical shape of objects may not be easily accessible--take margarita glasses, for instance. The current study examined 304 U.S. children 17- to 42-month-old (152 females) from 2017 to 2020, asking how shape, age, and vocabulary…

The present study aimed to explore the specific components of home literacy resources (HLR) and parental behaviours during shared book reading (SBR) that may contribute to the language development of Chinese-speaking hearing-impaired children. A total of 90 Chinese-speaking hearing-impaired children aged 3 to 6 years, along with their parents,…