Moving the hands or chewing in the encoding stage enhances memory, because body movement activates the frontal cortex, which is crucial to the memory process. However, how hand movement facilitates word memory in an applied setting and whether it produces long-term effects remain unclear. Grade 1 students studied 15 new words through different…

The study's purpose was to clarify the developmental characteristics of working memory in hard of hearing children on the basis of language ability and task variables. Eighty-three congenitally severely hard of hearing children in grades 3-9 attending Japanese elementary and junior high school were aggregated on the basis of grade and language…

This study examined the perceived and assessed speaking proficiency levels of 10 in-service Spanish teachers, their use of Spanish in and outside of work, and factors that motivate or hinder the maintenance or development of their proficiency. It also compared their current proficiency levels with their proficiency levels before completion of…

Questions about communication mode (a.k.a. "communication options" or "communication opportunities") remain among the most controversial issues in the many fields that are concerned with the development and well-being of children (and adults) who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing. In this manuscript, we argue that a large part of…

Background: Reading comprehension is a multifactorial process, but one of its features has been relatively under-investigated--it is the strategy used when answering reading comprehension questions. In order to find the correct answer, children can either respond to questions about a text relying on their text memory or look back at the written…

This study examined the extent to which kindergarten Spanish reading affected English reading growth trajectories through fourth grade among nationally representative Spanish-speaking bilingual students (N = 312) in the United States and whether the association varied by students' English oral proficiency. Multilevel growth curve analyses revealed…

The overarching goal of this literature review is to improve the understanding of the importance of oral language to critical emergent literacy skills and explore available assessment measures for use within the classroom. An overview of the components of language (i.e., content, form, and use) is provided. Measures of oral language gleaned from a…

Developing oral presentation skills requires both practice and expert feedback. Several systems have been developed during the last 20 years to provide ample practice opportunities and automated feedback for novice presenters. However, a comprehensive literature review discovered that none of those systems have been adequately evaluated in real…

This study explored the influence of speech rate (normal vs. fast), sentence length (short vs. long), and second language (L2) oral proficiency on listening comprehension in L2 Spanish. Thirty-one native English-speaking learners enrolled in upper-level Spanish courses were aurally exposed to 8 sentences of each type of speed--length matrix, for a…

Purpose: Parental language input (PLI) has reliably been found to influence child language development for children at risk of language delay, but previous work has generally restricted observations to the preschool years. The current study examined whether PLI during the early years explains variability in the spoken language abilities of…

In the present study, we used latent variable structural equation modeling to investigate relations between oral language, decoding, and two components of executive function (cognitive flexibility and working memory) and reading comprehension in a sample of 271 native English-speaking 9.00- to 14.83-year-olds. Results of the mediation analyses…

Language sample analysis (LSA) has been called the "gold standard" for clinical language assessment with children learning more than one language. The research literature discussing this clinical tool with bilingual children has grown substantially in recent years. This article reviews and synthesizes the literature on LSA in order to…

Scientific understanding of the nature of intelligence has steadily evolved over the years; however, the past century has seen an explosion of research aimed at understanding the construction of intelligence, the relationships between neuroscience and cognitive skills, and the best ways to measure intellectual abilities. While there is no clear…

Conceptual models of early writing suggest multiple component skills support children's early writing development. Although research interest in early writing skills has grown in recent years, the majority of studies focus narrowly on procedural knowledge or transcription skills (i.e., handwriting and spelling) to the relative exclusion of how…

This study proposed an innovative automated approach to differentiation of the vocabulary proficiency of Chinese speakers. A robust K-means algorithm was designed to compare the oral proficiency between L1 and L2 Chinese speakers regarding lexical richness and how relatively effective the various lexical measures were in performing the…