Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…

Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to "all") in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical…

Background: This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult. Methods: Participants were native English-speaking…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed…

This study examined the oral language skills of grade-two anglophone children enrolled in French Immersion and English-stream programs. The study had two objectives: (1) to compare performance between the groups on measures of receptive vocabulary, narrative comprehension, and narrative production (i.e., structure and language) in English; and (2)…

Native-English speaking adults use morphological decomposition to understand complex words (e.g. "farmer" becomes "farm-er"). Whether decomposition is driven by semantic organization is still unclear. It is also unclear whether ESL adults and elementary age children use the same word processing strategies as native speaking…

This study examines young English readers' ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37…

The aim of this experimental study is to examine the development of gender assignment and gender agreement in bilingual Albanian-Greek and English-Greek children as well as the exploitation of gender cues on the noun ending in real and pseudo-nouns. Four gender tasks were designed, two targeting gender assignment (determiner + noun production) and…

This study investigated the long-term effect of classroom-based input manipulation on children's use of subordination in a story re-telling task; it also explored the role of receptive vocabulary skills and expressive grammatical abilities in predicting the likelihood of priming. During a two-week priming phase, 47 monolingual English-speaking…

Grounded in the cross-linguistic influence(s) (CLI) literature, this study used objective measures to compare the use of English, lexical richness and syntactic complexity, and grammatical accuracy and fluency in the texts of three groups of Grade 6 French immersion students: Canadian-born anglophones (C-A), Canadian-born multilinguals (C-M), and…

We describe research results and lessons learned from a laboratory/ classroom collaboration with a school system offering both traditional English-only education and a dual-language track (Spanish/English). Through this collaboration, we addressed basic research questions informing malleable factors that impact cognitive development. In a…

Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

A two-cohort cluster-randomized trial was conducted to estimate effects of small-group supplemental vocabulary instruction for at-risk kindergarten English learners (ELs). Connections students received explicit instruction in high-frequency decodable root words, and interactive book reading (IBR) students were taught the same words in a storybook…

A two-cohort cluster randomized trial was conducted to estimate effects of small-group supplemental vocabulary instruction for at-risk kindergarten English learners (ELs). "Connections" students received explicit instruction in high-frequency decodable root words, and interactive book reading (IBR) students were taught the same words in…

Using Beck, McKeown and Kucan's (2002) three-tiered model as a general framework for vocabulary, this article sheds light on the construct of academic vocabulary and how it might be measured. Using illustrative writing samples of student work of different genres and drawing on corpus based studies, I highlight the distinction between general, high…