In this article we investigate data from digital interactions between native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) dyads of English during synchronous computer mediated communication. As opposed to most studies into the NS-NNS interface, we reversed the expert-learner participant roles: during the task performance, the NS was the (cultural)…

We assessed 24-month-old infants' lexical processing efficiency for both novel and familiar words. Prior work documented that 19-month-olds successfully identify referents of familiar words (e.g., The dog is so little) as well as novel words whose meanings were informed only by the surrounding sentence (e.g., The vep is crying), but that the speed…

Task-based language teaching research has expanded substantially in foreign language (FL) contexts but most research studies have been carried out with young adults in university settings, despite the fact that FL programs for children are on the increase worldwide. However, there is a clear lack of research-based evidence of what children…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

This study is the first to explore the contribution of different types of teacher regulatory talk--directive, guiding, and autonomy supportive talk--in children's development of self-regulation across cultures. Teacher-to-student talk was analyzed under naturalistic conditions in eight Year 4 classrooms, all situated in different primary schools…

Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal…

The aim of the study was to test whether proficient L2 users living in an L1-dominant environment would exhibit significant L2-L1 translation priming in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a semantic categorisation task (SCT). Only a few previous studies have found significant L2-L1 priming in LDT whereas significant results have often been…

The current study investigated the capacity of a new test assessing phonological awareness to detect differences between Italian children with and without developmental dyslexia. Specifically, the task involves blending of a list of pseudo-words, and excludes lexical knowledge as a source of task performance. Fifty-four third to fifith Italian…

This paper aims to develop a prototype of learning for the achievement of critical thinking skills of Higher Distance Education students through the utilization of open educational resources (OER). It is based on a research and development project conducted from September 2013 until April 2014 at Universitas Terbuka (UT), the Indonesia Open…

This study has a twofold goal: to investigate whether task type has an effect on the number, focus, and outcome of language-related episodes (LREs) and to determine whether that effect is the same for video SCMC (VidSCMC) and audio SCMC (AudSCMC) groups. Intermediate Spanish learners participated in this study involving two jigsaw tasks based on…

This dissertation examines the thesis that implicit learning plays a role in learning about scientific phenomena, and subsequently, in conceptual change. Decades of research in learning science demonstrate that a primary challenge of science education is overcoming prior, naive knowledge of natural phenomena in order to gain scientific…

This paper presents a rule-based task-oriented dialogue system for second language learning and a knowledge extraction method which automatically extracts the training data for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and dialogue rules for dialogue management from a Dialogue Map (DM). The DM consists of turn-by-turn utterances between the system and…

Although the use of technology for pragmatics instruction has attracted significant attention from scholars, the number of studies regarding the impact of self-access materials to this end is limited. Nearpod is a useful cloud-based application to support self-paced learning. This paper aims to probe the effect of learning through Nearpod on EFL…

This study uses both offline and online tasks in order to investigate whether second language learners of English from an article-less first-language (Mandarin) are able to integrate the indefinite article into their grammar despite the lack of articles in their first language. This article reports on two studies, one on learners' sensitivity to…

This paper compares the initial state of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition for English articles to examine the influence of L2 proficiency on positive transfer from L2 to L3. We tested 36 L1 Turkish/L2 German adolescent learners of L3 English (L3 group), 41 L1 Turkish adolescent learners of L2 English (L2 group), and 10…