The goal of this longitudinal study is to examine the relationships between early child factors (i.e., age at identification, enrollment in early intervention, oral language skills) and school readiness skills (i.e., conceptual knowledge) in a group of young children with hearing loss (HL). Standardized language, cognition, and conceptual…

Aim: The aim of this study was to compare spoken language production in children with permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) whose PCHI was confirmed either early or late. Method: Audio-taped spoken narrative was assessed for syntax, phonology, morphology, and narrative in transcripts from a population-based sample of 89 children (49 males,…

"Headsprout Early Reading"[TM] is an Internet-based supplemental early literacy curriculum consisting of forty 20-minute animated episodes that are designed to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The program adapts to a child's responses, providing additional instruction and review if a child does…

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which bilingual speakers maintain language-specific phonological contrasts for homorganic stops when a cue is shared across both languages. To this end, voice onset time (VOT) was investigated in three groups of participants: early bilinguals speakers of Canadian French and Canadian English (n =…

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this "arbitrariness" assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking…

This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, use of null subjects, selection of prepositions, agreement, and possession. The degree of…

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nuse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1…

This article discusses theoretical and practical aspects pertaining to oral presentations in the EFL context. It discusses issues and proposes ideas concerning the advantages of presentations, types of presentations, ways of arranging presentations in the classroom, possible topics of presentations and sources of data and information obtained for…

Introduction: Due to a considerable lack in empirical efforts and appropriate instruments, and theoretically rooted in a cognitive-motivational perspective on academic personality development, the present study analyzes a questionnaire for measuring EFL learners' self-perceptions of oral narrative competencies and perceived anxiety concerning oral…

The generality of the orthographic consistency effect in speech recognition tasks previously reported for Portuguese beginning readers was assessed in French-speaking children, as the French orthographic code presents a higher degree of inconsistency than the Portuguese one. Although the findings obtained with the French second graders replicated…

Prosodic contrastive focus is used to attract the listener's attention to a specific part of the utterance. Mostly conceived of as auditory/acoustic, it also has visible correlates which have been shown to be perceived. This study aimed at analyzing auditory-visual perception of prosodic focus by elaborating a paradigm enabling an auditory-visual…

We present analyses of the impact of morphological awareness on spelling. Initial measures of morphological awareness and a number of control measures were taken at age 7 and spelling was assessed two years later (n = 115). Results indicated that the appreciation of morphology in oral language makes a contribution to spelling that is impervious to…

French learners at university meet difficulties in the comprehension of oral English. Being in a formal context of language learning, they need to develop language awareness to compensate for insufficient exposure to the English language. To meet the students' needs, data was collected in order to pinpoint the main errors made by French learners…

In addition to learning to read and write for the first time, adult English language learners with limited or emerging literacy skills must acquire oral English. Often, learners with limited print literacy in their first language have oral skills in English that exceed their English literacy skills (Geva & Zadeh, 2006). While this mismatch of oral…

The present linguistic analyses of two children (aged 8 and 10) with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and their two matched controls are based on dyadic therapist-child conversations and on picture description tasks. The circa 100 analysis features covering aspects of (i) lexicon (e.g. prominalization), (ii) structural characteristics of turns, (iii)…