Purpose: It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to…

This study investigates the concurrent and longitudinal relationships between polysemous word knowledge and reading comprehension among bilingual students (n = 107) followed from seventh to eighth grade. Standardized tests were used to measure decoding skills, broad vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. Data about students' polysemous…

When students of English deliver oral presentations at university on academic topics, there is often a dilemma as to whether to incorporate academic vocabulary into their monologues or not. Academic vocabulary can help students to present their ideas concisely and be a 'badge of identity' to the academic community. However, acquiring a productive…

Purpose: This study examines intraword variability in 40 typically developing French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6-4;8 (years;months). Specifically, it measures rate of intraword variability and investigates which factors best account for it. They include child-specific ones such as age, expressive vocabulary, gender,…

According to the RAND model framework, reading comprehension test performance is influenced by readers' reading skills or reader characteristics, test properties, and their interactions. However, little empirical research has systematically compared the impacts of reader characteristics, test properties, and reader-test interactions across…

To communicate, children must discriminate and identify speech sounds. Because visual speech plays an important role in this process, we explored how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification by children. Critical items had intact visual speech (e.g. baez) coupled to non-intact (excised onsets) auditory speech (signified…

Word lists present an essential tool in vocabulary teaching. Compilation of specific word lists for various fields is one of the most prominent branches of research in this field at the moment. New methodological changes in word list formation have been proposed because of the appearance of the New-GSL (Brezina & Gablasova, 2013) and AVL…

This study examines the influence of pre-departure proficiency on English as a second language (L2) oral development after a semester studying abroad in two distinct learning contexts. The data analysed were collected from tertiary level students (N = 33) who undertook an ERASMUS exchange semester in a European country where English was either the…

The present study aimed to examine the role of phonological--semantic flexibility (PSF) in learning to read Chinese. PSF refers to a specific flexibility applied to process the dual linguistic dimensions of words (i.e., sound and meaning). A correlational study (Study 1) was conducted to determine the unique contribution of PSF to three aspects of…

One of the consequences of the growing number of English-taught programmes offered by European universities is the top-down request that lecturers switch from their L1 to English, for teaching, while the administrative staff is required to communicate with international students. To help the academic staff cope with the change, some universities…

Being able to read and write in English as a second language (L2) in the globalized world has been increasingly considered important to gain greater personal, academic, and business achievement. This study investigates English (L2) reading and writing abilities in relation to first language (L1) reading and writing abilities, L2 vocabulary…

In the realm of language proficiency assessments, the domain description inference and the extrapolation inference are key components of a validity argument. Biber et al.'s description of the lexicogrammatical features of the spoken and written registers in the T2K-SWAL corpus has served as support for the TOEFL iBT test's domain description and…

Cinquain is a poetic form, or stanza, of five lines that do not rhyme, which follows some strict rules. Cinquain is also considered to be a training means, a method, a technique, an instrument used for reflection, for synthesis of all knowledge on a particular topic (a being, an object, an ensemble of objects), towards developing one's creativity.…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

Derivational knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EFL students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of productive derivational knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that…