Background: Connectives, such as "because" or "although," explicitly indicate how to semantically link individual segments of a text. Knowledge of connectives has been shown to significantly contribute to variance explanation in comprehension of English and Dutch texts, particularly amongst monolingual students and students…

Purpose: Preschoolers born preterm are at an increased risk for the development of language impairments. The primary objective of this study was to document the expressive language skills of preschoolers born preterm through 2 assessment procedures, language sample analysis, and standardized assessment. A secondary objective was to investigate the…

This study examines whether an e-book with a dictionary could support parents' mediation of new words during shared book reading, more than the child's independent reading of an e-book with and without a dictionary. The participants included 128 kindergartners and 64 mothers who were randomly divided into four groups: independent reading of the…

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks,…

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual…

Four 5-year-old children with receptive language within normal limits and who required augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) received instruction in producing six different semantic--syntactic structures (three treatment and three generalization targets). Participants accessed single-meaning graphic symbols using an AAC app on an iPad…

We introduce a novel measure of abstractness based on the amount of information of a concept computed from its position in a semantic taxonomy. We refer to this measure as "precision". We propose two alternative ways to measure precision, one based on the path length from a concept to the root of the taxonomic tree, and another one based…

The late Ruqaiya Hasan was an enthusiastic but exacting reader of Vygotsky: she reproached him for lacking a theory of language use, for using an asocial model of education without class variation in semantic code, and above all for using an atomistic unit of analysis, namely lexical word meaning. In this paper, I take up these criticisms and…

Students' knowledge of vocabulary affects their reading comprehension. Despite abundant research findings in vocabulary learning, practical instructional methods for use in schools are typically underdeveloped. This article proposes a research-based method for teaching the meanings of base academic vocabulary (i.e., Tier 2) words. The method…

Teachers are thrown open to abundance of free text answers which are very daunting to read and evaluate. Automatic assessments of open ended answers have been attempted in the past but none guarantees 100% accuracy. In order to deal with the overload involved in this manual evaluation, a new tool becomes necessary. The unique superlative model…

This study aimed to determine whether the reading skills of third-grade schoolchildren are associated with their preferences for semantic, phonological, and shape competitors (images or printed words) after being exposed to a spoken critical word. Two groups of children participated: skilled readers and less-skilled readers. Through a…

This Commentary examines where the creativity research has been and where it is going. They key points include evolving definitions of creativity, interdisciplinarity in the creativity research, divergent thinking as a reliable index of creative potential, improvements in testing, the impact of technology, the inclusion of political, moral, and…

Background & Aims: This study ran within the framework of the Thales Aphasia Project that investigated the efficacy of elaborated semantic feature analysis (ESFA). We evaluated the treatment integrity (TI) of ESFA, i.e., the degree to which therapists implemented treatment as intended by the treatment protocol, in two different formats:…

Although numerous studies have identified a correlational relationship between vocabulary and comprehension, we know less about vocabulary interventions that impact reading comprehension. Therefore, this study is a systematic review of vocabulary interventions with comprehension outcomes. Analyses of 36 studies that met criteria are organized…

Various learners with various requirements have led to the raise of a crucial concern in the area of e-learning. A new technology for propagating learning to learners worldwide, has led to an evolution in the e-learning industry that takes into account all the requirements of the learning process. In spite of the wide growing, the e-learning…