This study investigated the strength of lexical and non-lexical processing among Arabic (L1) English (L3)-speaking children (fourth and fifth grades, N = 532) in two writing systems that vary in terms of transparency. Children were assessed using word reading, phonological and vocabulary measures. In Arabic, the study focused on standard form.…

Background: When reading a word, skilled adult readers automatically decompose the word into its separate morphemes by processing the word's morpho-orthography. In children, however, it still remains unclear when and how they start to automatically decompose words into morphemes. Methods: To better understand how primary school children learn and…

Naming semantically related images results in progressively slower responses as more images are named. There is considerable documentation in adults of this phenomenon, known as cumulative semantic interference. Few studies have focused on this phenomenon in children. The present research investigated cumulative semantic interference effects in…

Research has uncovered a semantic cue effect for short inconsistent word problems; the presence of functionally related objects makes them easier for pupils than the presence of categorically related ones. This study builds on this result by investigating other types of problems. Variants of problems differing in a semantic cue were solved by…

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds' real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to "SVO" or "OVS" sentences containing active…

Substantial research among bilingual adults indicates that exposure to words primes other semantically related words within and across languages, as well as the direct translation equivalents [e.g. Chen and Ng 1989. "Semantic Facilitation and Translation Priming Effects in Chinese-English Bilinguals." "Memory & Cognition"…

The number of learners seeking to acquire an L2 by means of apps is ever-increasing. This study examined the effectiveness of using the app "Mondly" for the acquisition of L2 English vocabulary while accounting for differences in the acquisition of receptive and productive aspects of word knowledge. Twelve Danish young learners (aged…

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as "Tigers have stripes" and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as "All tigers have…

Purpose: This study investigated component skills in oral language development utilizing and validating a new assessment battery in a large (N = 800) and representative sample of Greek students 4-7 years of age. Method: All participants enrolled in public schools from four geographical regions (Attica, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Crete) that varied…

Purpose: The purpose of our study was to test the hypotheses (a) that children with dyslexia have spoken word learning deficits primarily related to phonology and (b) that children with dyslexia and concomitant developmental language disorder (DLD) have word learning deficits related to both phonology and semantic processing when compared to peers…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method: Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing (n = 41) or…

The ability to automatically assess the quality of paraphrases can be very useful for facilitating literacy skills and providing timely feedback to learners. Our aim is twofold: a) to automatically evaluate the quality of paraphrases across four dimensions: lexical similarity, syntactic similarity, semantic similarity and paraphrase quality, and…

The current investigation examined the developmental changes involved in processing semantic context in auditorily presented sentences, as well as underlying attentional and suppression mechanisms. Thirty-nine typically developing school-aged children aged 6;0-14;0 years participated in the current cross-sectional sentential auditory word…

This paper presents a Vygotskian research device that focuses on collaborative activities based on the manipulation of linguistic objects in a primary school classroom, with 8-9-year-old children. Through social exchanges among the different points of view, the children were engaged in a dynamic process of building and negotiating mathematical…

Perturbations to the speech articulators induced by frequently using an interfering object during infancy (i.e., pacifier) might shape children's language experience and the building of conceptual representations. Seventy-one typically developing third graders performed a semantic categorization task with abstract, concrete and emotional words.…