Spatial language and ability play important roles in children's cognitive development. Spatial ability in kindergarten predicts achievement in reading, math, science, and technology in primary school and therefore constitutes an important skill set in preparation for school entrance. Good spatial thinking skills are required for learning in…

Learning words in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and story retelling was tested using an e-book with dictionary. One hundred and sixty-three Arabic-speaking kindergartners were randomly divided into 5 groups. The experimental groups read the e-book with a dictionary: (1) with a dynamic illustration and a request to vocalize the word; (2) with a…

Bilinguals are more successful than monolinguals in novel language learning due to the transfer of prior learning strategies and experiences with two languages. The extent of such transfer may depend on the similarity between previously acquired languages and a novel language. This hypothesis was tested in relation to vocabulary learning in…

Conceptualizing numbers as discursive constructs generated in, and for the sake of, communication, we investigated the development of the numerical discourse of Milo, a boy who was 2 years and 8 months old when we first met him and whom we then followed for 18 months. Our analyses of the child's evolving responses to the question "Where is…

Narratives, or stories, are used every day by people as a way of making sense of and communicating events in the world. Narratives can be highly useful as a learning tool in science education. Though research on narrative-based pedagogy in science education and communication is very common, most of that research was done in formal settings. Our…

The study investigates the effect of hybrid technology (HT), which combine physical objects and virtual effects, on learning receptive-vocabulary in English as a foreign-language (EFL) among students with dyslexia. Participants included 106 students aged 9-12. The students with dyslexia were randomly divided into intervention groups that used…

We examined an intervention in kindergarten using an e-book for vocabulary enrichment. In programme (a), the children read the e-book with a dictionary and the teacher's support. In programme (b), the children read the e-book with the dictionary independently. In programme (c), the children read the e-book without a dictionary (control). The…

Objective: Two agendas guided this study. The first is to report on a dynamic intervention programme that utilizes key developmental domains and strategies, such as emotional expression opportunities, motor activity, learning in groups, playful learning, and shared reading. The second is to explore the possibility that dynamic intervention can…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effect of bilingual narrative intervention on vocabulary gains in Hebrew (school language) and English (home language) among English-Hebrew bilinguals, using a block design (one language at a time), and to determine whether there was cross-linguistic transfer to the language that was…

Arabic is characterized by diglossia, which involves the use of two language varieties within a single speech community: Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday speech and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for formal speech and reading/writing. Earlier research suggests that some Arabic-speaking children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) might favor MSA…

Previous studies found that bilingual children and adults with typical language development (TLD) perform better than monolinguals in novel word learning, but show lower scores on lexical retrieval tasks (e.g., naming known words). Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) lack in their abilities in both tasks compared with children with…

In order to inform English foreign language (EFL) diagnostic assessment of literacy, this study examined the extent to which 175 first-language Hebrew-speaking EFL young learners from fifth to tenth grade exhibited differences in single-letter grapheme recognition, sub-word, and word reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and…

This study sought to explore the advanced lexicon, one of the hallmarks of text quality. To this end, we analysed the advanced lexicon deployed in the production of two types of texts -- a descriptive and an argumentative -- by Hebrew-speaking school children. Our study had two goals, the first to trace the developmental path of the use of…

This study examines whether an e-book with a dictionary could support parents' mediation of new words during shared book reading, more than the child's independent reading of an e-book with and without a dictionary. The participants included 128 kindergartners and 64 mothers who were randomly divided into four groups: independent reading of the…

Listening comprehension (LC) is considered an important but complex skill that predicts later reading comprehension in various languages. In this study, we aimed at understanding the relationship of LC with different linguistic and cognitive components. For this purpose, 262 Arabic-speaking kindergartners participated in this study. Our regression…