Purpose: This study examined the differences in spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA) in inflectional (gender, number, possessive pronouns, and tense) construction use in Arabic among preschoolers. Moreover, we tested the contribution of the inflectional constructions possessed in kindergarten to reading skills in the first grade and…

Globally classrooms are increasingly linguistically diverse. Research often oversimplifies lived linguistic heterogeneity as binary variables: native versus non-native. Linguistic distance (LD) measures allow a fine-grained operationalization of linguistic diversity in foreign language education. This study investigated associations of cognate LDs…

In this study of more than 1,000 typical and at-risk elementary Arabic-speaking students in Oman, we explore relationships between pragmatic (and other) language skills, literacy, cognition, and behavior and the degree to which demography impacts performance on associated tasks. We found, in most cases, that females performed better than males,…

The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others' authority or mental perspective, where "others" stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the…

We report results from children learning to read in one of four different languages: Croatian, English, Estonian and Swedish. The languages all have an alphabetical script but vary greatly on the dimension deep-shallow (or complexity-simplicity, or opacity-transparency), i.e., how close orthography and phonology are related. These languages also…

This study was conducted in Maharashtra, India with children studying in a regional medium (Marathi) government school. In Marathi, the translation of the word 'about' is not very commonly used. The aim of the study was to see how the children used uncertain language about prediction while engaged in a statistical investigation and how children…