Performing a stay in a country where the L2 is the official language can provide the perfect immersion for L2 development (traditional study abroad). In the case of English learners, internationalization and the role of English as a lingua franca make it unnecessary to perform the stay in an English-speaking country. Hence, an increasing number of…

The development of copying behaviours of a group of infants from 9 to 15 months of age is analysed. These behaviours are classified according to their type (mimetic or imitated) and function (instrumental, social or hybrid). The function of the behaviours is derived from observable indicators linked to dyadic interaction. Mimetic behaviours are…

Introduction: Numerous studies prove the importance of emotional intelligence in promoting emotional regulation, self-knowledge, empathy and the ability to develop strong social relationships. Some of them highlight the fundamental role of emotional vocabulary, being the good development of this a key factor to name, interpret and regulate our…

Background & aims: Individuals with non- or minimally verbal autism (nvASD) are primarily characterized by a severe speech production deficit, with speech limited to no or only a few words by school age. Significant unclarity remains over variability in language profiles across the lifespan, the nature of the language impairment seen, and…

Research on the implementation of CLIL at the onset of primary school is limited and has largely overlooked the role of other sources of individual differences. This study investigated the effects of the CLIL approach to English learning, together with the effects of out-of-school exposure to the language through media and other sources of…

To date, several studies have investigated the potential benefits of using Quizlet and podcasts for vocabulary development. However, they have mainly focused on the use of available material, and its effects on receptive vocabulary acquisition and students' motivation. In contrast, relatively little has been done to study the effects of…

The vocabulary size and composition of one group of full-term and three groups of low risk preterm children with different gestational ages (GA) were longitudinally compared at 10, 22 and 30 months of age. Expressive vocabulary development was assessed through the CDI. Cognitive development was also assessed at 22 months (Batelle Developmental…

This paper represents a multimodal analysis of the paraverbal (prosodic and gesture) features of expressive female political speech in Latin America and Spain. The language corpus consisted of public speeches delivered by Spanish-speaking female politicians Eva Peron, Christina de Kirchner and Manuela Carmena. The article includes an overview of…

This study investigates the role of biological age and L2 exposure on the achievement of two groups of Catalan-Spanish intermediate learners of English in secondary school (Group A, Formal Instruction (FI), N = 50; Group B, FI + CLIL, N = 50) regarding receptive and productive L2 skills as well as grammatical knowledge. Learners were matched for…

This article reports on the outcomes of a longitudinal case study to gauge the impact of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) on two of the least researched language skills: oral comprehension and production. It worked with 24 students in the fourth grade of Compulsory Secondary Education in a public school in Andalusia (southern Spain)…

Online testing is becoming a popular way to deliver language tests, partly because of its reduced cost, partly because of the high quality of test data collection. In language tests, interface validation has received a limited attention in professional literature (García, Magal, da Rocha, & Fernández, 2010). This paper will show the validation…

This study investigated the formulation of verb argument structure in Catalan- and Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing age-matched controls. We compared how language production can be guided by conceptual factors, such as the organization of the entities participating in an event and knowledge…

This paper explores the concurrent and predictive validity of the long and short forms of the Galician version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (IDHC). Forty-two Galician-speaking children were longitudinally evaluated at age 1 ; 6, 2 ; 0 and 4 ; 0. On the first two occasions, the subjects' vocabulary and grammar skills were assessed through the IDHC.…

Background: Our main purpose was to compare the lexical development of Spanish children with Down syndrome (DS) and children with typical development (TD) to investigate the relationship between cognitive and vocabulary development in comprehension and oral and gestural production. Method: Participants were 186 children with DS and 186 children…

This paper reports an assessment of the collocational competence of students of English Linguistics at the University of Granada. This was carried out to meet a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, we aimed to establish a solid corpus-driven approach based upon a systematic and reliable framework for the evaluation of collocational competence in…