An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and…

In this commentary on the Special Issue, I will address the question of what memory spans measure concerning language, as language has, at least, a linear and a hierarchical dimension. I suggest that if anything what is measured has to do with the linear dimension. Then, I will discuss the welcome results on bilingual children with language…

In this chapter we use the posthumanist perspective introduced in Chapter 2 to work with a range of 'data events' from the "Beyond Words" study involving post-verbal people with dementia and their close networks. We discuss and critique the primacy of 'voice' in lifelong learning, where it has been highly privileged. Instead, our…

Scores derived from intelligence instruments predict many important outcomes in life, so it is not surprising that researchers and clinicians seek out interventions aimed at increasing these scores. Dixon et al. (J Behav Educ, 2019. https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1007/s10864-019-09344-7) recently investigated the relation between instruction based on…

Short term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) performance consistently predict language abilities in children with developmental language disorders. However, causality is not fully established. Moreover, evidence from the fine-grained analysis of STM/WM tasks and comprehension of complex sentences, suggests that long term memory (LTM)…

We use data from the Young Lives longitudinal survey to analyse the effect of socioeconomic conditions and gender on the educational performance of young children in India. In particular, we use data for standardised scores on two cognitive tests: the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and a maths test. Our results show that there are…

The importance of early vocabulary development to later reading comprehension has been well-established. However, there have been a number of criticisms that the assessments typically used to measure oral vocabulary knowledge do not adequately capture the complexity of this construct. This conceptual review works towards a more robust theoretical…

Gender differences exist in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math. There are differences between male and female undergraduates in the learning of various subjects. This paper analyzed the gender differences caused by intellectual and non-intellectual factors, such as math ability, verbal ability, spatial capability,…

In response to Golinkoff, Hoff, Rowe, Tamis-LeMonda, and Hirsh-Pasek's (2018) commentary, we clarify our goals, outline points of agreement and disagreement between our respective positions, and address the inadvertently harmful consequences of the word gap claim. We maintain that our study constitutes a serious empirical challenge to the word…

The Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales, Second Edition (RIAS-2; Reynolds & Kamphaus, 2015) is an intelligence test for those aged 3 to 94 years. It contains eight subtests designed to assess general intelligence, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, memory, and processing speed. The two subtests targeting processing speed are new to the…

This article provides a microscopic view of learners' first encounters with multimodal texts in their primary EFL classrooms. It is argued that multimodal texts create opportunities for language development in the primary EFL classroom: they offer different access points for comprehension, invite participation, and motivate repeated practice so…

National and international large-scale assessments (LSA) have a major impact on educational systems, which raises fundamental questions about the validity of the measures regarding their internal structure and their relations to relevant covariates. Given its importance, research on the validity of instruments specifically developed for LSA is…

We evaluated the emergence of untaught second-language skills following directly taught listener and intraverbal responses. Three preschool children were taught first-language (English) listener responses (e.g., "Point to the horse") and second-language (Welsh) intraverbal responses (e.g., "What is horse in Welsh?" [ceffyl]).…

Large numbers of children of low income families in the United States arrive at kindergarten already far behind their more affluent peers on measures of school readiness. In the absence of any federal preschool policy and amidst alarm about this growing divide, universal prekindergarten (UPK) programs have been launched around the United States,…

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition: Canadian (WISC-V[superscript CDN]; Wechsler, 2014) is published by Pearson Canada Assessment. The WISC-V[superscript CDN] is a norm-referenced, individually administered intelligence battery that provides a comprehensive diagnostic profile of the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of…