Emotion vocabulary development is a skill that can be targeted in preschools using shared book reading. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a shared book reading intervention on the development of preschool children's emotional vocabulary. Five typically developing 4-year-old children participated in the study. A single-case…

The present study examined whether and how early cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic awareness, including phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), Chinese word reading (CWR), and listening comprehension (LC) influenced Chinese children's later reading comprehension. In total, 153 Chinese children were recruited. Path…

The study investigates whether comprehension of derived words in text context requires a complete understanding of word parts. It explores comprehension of derived words as a function of learner proficiency and contextual clues. Ninety English-as-a-foreign-language learners at three proficiency levels participated in three successive tests…

Assessment plays a vital role in English language learning as it helps students recognize their weak and strong points. Two main types of assessment are dynamic assessment (DA) and static assessment (SA) that their effects have not been examined on Iraqi EFL students' resilience, burnout, positive orientation (PO), and language academic…

F0 contours convey multiple types of information, including lexical and post-lexical meanings, as well as affective and socio-indexical indicators. This dissertation investigates the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation in Thai, focusing on how sentence position influences the acoustic realization and perceptual…

A bilingual's language system is highly interactive. When hearing a second language (L2), bilinguals access native-language (L1) words that share sounds across languages. In the present study, we examine whether input modality and L2 proficiency moderate the extent to which bilinguals activate L1 phonotactic constraints (i.e., rules for combining…

Oral communication often takes place in noisy environments, which challenge spoken-word recognition. Previous research has suggested that the presence of background noise extends the number of candidate words competing with the target word for recognition and that this extension affects the time course and accuracy of spoken-word recognition. In…

The spoken word production process includes four identifiable stages: conceptualization, lexical selection, form encoding, and articulation. This dissertation studies the spoken word production process of producing Mandarin monosyllabic words, focusing on lexical selection and form encoding. The Chinese languages, including Mandarin, differ from…

We investigated the benefits of two ways to use flashcards to perform retrieval practice: alone versus with a partner. In three experiments, undergraduate students learned word-definition pairs using flashcards alone (Individual condition) or with another student (Paired condition). Participants then made global judgments of learning (gJOLs;…

Although the ability to understand speech in adverse listening conditions is paramount for effective communication across the life span, little is understood about how this critical processing skill develops. This study asks how the dynamics of spoken word recognition (i.e., lexical access and competition) change during soft speech in 8- to…

Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernández (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as 'd', but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as 'b', thus indicating that the directionality of the…

Recent media reports suggest that teachers and teacher educators are using the three-cueing system model to justify an overemphasis on context to help students read unfamiliar words. In this conceptual article, the authors argue that although these critiques are exaggerated, the current climate provides an opportunity for teacher educators to…

This dissertation provides evidence that reading is best explained as rational gathering of visual information to identify words efficiently. Although empirical evidence from human reading research suggests a close link between eye movements and cognitive process, it is not clear how readers decide when and where to move their eyes as a function…

This study investigated the direct and indirect associations of different executive function skills with Chinese word reading and writing. A total of 213 Cantonese-speaking kindergarteners (97 girls, mean age = 73.3 months) participated in this study. Their working memory, inhibition control, cognitive flexibility, orthographic knowledge,…

Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…