In recent years, Third Language Acquisition (TLA) in Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI) research has been debated regarding background languages' impact on learning a target language. While Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research often emphasizes the primary influence of the first language (L1) on the target language, it does not discount the…

Counterfactuals are a type of conditional sentences used to convey situations that do not correspond to reality. Tense morphology is a core ingredient to encode counterfactuals in English and most Indo-European languages. Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Chinese) lacks tense morphology and does not require counterfactuals to be formally distinguished…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

New technologies that combine digital sensors with automated processing algorithms are now being deployed to study preschool classrooms. This article provides an overview of these new sensing technologies, focusing on automated speaker classification, the analysis of children's and teachers' speech, and the detection and analysis of their…

Language development plays a pivotal role in a child's cognitive and overall growth, progressing through identifiable stages that ultimately lead to adult communication. It serves as a significant indicator of a child's intellectual and overall development. This study aims to explore the impact of daily technology use on children's language…

Learner corpus research has expanded from focusing primarily on English as a second language (L2) to include languages such as L2 Spanish, reflecting the growing importance of corpus linguistics in second language acquisition (SLA) research. In this context, and because prompts are the means by which learner corpora gather their texts, it has…

Children on the autism spectrum often have deficits in language development. Given the resources required to provide intensive intervention services, either in person or via telehealth, it may be important to maximize instructional time by using procedures that lead to generative language use, such as matrix training. Matrix training involves…

This Family and Practitioner Brief discusses how deaf children who have not had access to a complete language from birth often encounter unique challenges in developing academic language skills, particularly in the realm of inference-making.

This research explores how paper and online assessments (OA) can affect EFL learners' personal development variables such as self-esteem, mindfulness, demotivation, and language learning development. Sixty intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) students participated in the current research and were randomly grouped into the experimental…

It is known that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays a key role in language development. Previous research, however, has also identified significant variability across societies in terms of how often IDS occurs. For example, some studies report very little IDS in non-western, small-scale societies -- including children growing up in small-scale…

Previous research has shown language-specific features play a guiding role in how children develop expression of events with speech and gestures. This study adopts a multimodal approach and examines Mandarin Chinese, a language that features context use and verb serializations. Forty children (four-to-seven years old) and ten adults were asked to…

Second-language (L2) knowledge of English is an essential communication tool in the contemporary era of globalization in many research and business fields. Among the important tasks in English education is the measurement of student proficiency. While various tests purport to measure proficiency in learning English, repeated preparation and…

Linguistic distancing behaviours indicative of linguistic dissociation (Moore, 2023) have been documented in social scientific and literary accounts focusing on the lives of Japanese-English late plurilinguals (LPs; e.g. Harrison, 2011; Kelsky, 2001; McMahill, 2001; Mori, 1997; Takahashi, 2013). Across these cases, diverse Japanese-English LPs…

In the Yoruba community, proverbs are regarded as Yoruba philosophy repository, with wisdom, brevity, criticality, and stored experience that are believed to be a viable tool of acquiring the language. Hinging on reversing language shift model theory, the study investigated: (a) whether Yoruba proverbs are effective in the acquisition of Yoruba…

Copying words by writing and typing are two effective methods in traditional learning, but their merits for learning L2 words have seldom been compared. Because of technological advances and the growing popularity of utilising smart mobile products to acquire L2 vocabulary, this study investigated the effectiveness of writing and typing techniques…