Picture book reading is widely regarded as an activity that promotes multiple aspects of children's language acquisition, including their vocabulary development. Historically, researchers interested in what underlies the link between picture book reading and vocabulary development have investigated a suite of caregiver behaviors during picture…

This article compares two methods for detecting local item dependence (LID): residual correlation examination and Rasch testlet modeling (RTM), in a commonly used 3:6 matching format and an extended matching test (EMT) format. The two formats are hypothesized to facilitate different levels of item dependency due to differences in the number of…

Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using "zed" instead of "zee"), but do they flexibly…

Purpose: The study aims to evaluate the readability, comprehensibility, and vocabulary knowledge of SRH educational materials available online and on paper to inform health educational material development for young adolescents. Design/methodology/approach: The study used a sequential mixed-method design. Thirty-four online and one print…

The aim of this study is to explore the relation of morphological awareness to vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension for middle school students in Korea. A total of 121 students (73 boys and 48 girls) in Grade 7 from two middle schools in a metropolitan city in South Korea participated in the study. The students were assessed on the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children with and without speech sound disorders (SSDs), analyzing the data both by group and continuously. Method: Sixty-one Australian English--speaking children aged 48-69 months participated in this…

Vocabulary is regarded as an important part of communicative language ability and a significant predictor of second language proficiency. The relation between vocabulary knowledge and communicative language ability has important implications for L2 students, foreign language teachers and educational systems. Thus, many studies have been conducted…

The study investigated how well Swedish adolescents recognize the meaning of derived words in English and whether this knowledge is determined by learner proficiency, word frequency, or affix type. Participants were 88 school students in two proficiency groups: 39 advanced 12th graders and 49 intermediate 9th graders. Two tests of receptive…

Previous research on the effects of word-level factors on lexical acquisition has shown that frequency and concreteness are most important. Here, we investigate CDI data from 1,030 Dutch children, collected with the short form of the Dutch CDI, to address (i) how word-level factors predict lexical acquisition, once child-level factors are…

Purpose: We examined the properties of mean length of utterance (MLU) in Czech, a morphologically complex Slavic language. We compared the scores of MLU calculated in different units and based on different sample lengths and assessed its validity against another transcript and test-based measures. Method: One hundred nine children were recorded…

Research Findings: The present study examined the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) and Chinese children's development of English as a second language in Hong Kong, and whether the home literacy environment (HLE) was an important mediator. Participants were 237 children (110 girls, M[subscript age] = 47.38 months, SD[subscript age] =…

In spite of the proliferation of research studies on vocabulary knowledge, investigating the relationship between self-regulation, vocabulary size, and collocational knowledge among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners has received scant attention. The current study aimed to investigate whether vocabulary and collocation size can explain…

Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as "key…

The present study aims to design a model course on Information Literacy (IL) and Research Ethics (RE) for university curricula and examine the role of this course in university ranking. The study followed a mixed approach to collect required data for designing the course. First, research students' responses regarding IL and RE were collected using…

Based on theories on vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, and reading comprehension subcomponents, ten attributes/subskills were defined for 50 items from relevant subtests of TEM4 (Band Four of Test for English Majors in China). Cognitive diagnosis was conducted on the TEM4 data of the randomly sampled 2285 examinees (roughly at the B2 level)…