Over the last three decades, emotional intelligence (EI) has received considerable empirical attention especially in academic context. Following this line of research, the study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between trait EI and EFL learners' second language (L2) oral performance. A sample of 102 Iranian EFL students, all…

This paper reports on a study of day care children, ages 2 years 6 months to almost 5 years old, who visited a naturalized area near their day care once a week, over several months. The focus of this paper is on the embodied learning and expression of children's learning, along with their use of oral language. The children engaged in some…

Purpose: The ability to identify children early in development who are at substantial risk for language/literacy difficulties would have great benefit both for the children and for the educational and therapeutic institutions that serve them. Information that is relatively easily available prior to the age of 3 years, such as late talking, family…

This paper explores the extent gender differences affect foreign language anxiety and student beliefs about spoken corrective feedback. A random sample of 100 Turkish students (50 males, 50 females) who were preintermediate level learners of English as a foreign language at a state preparatory school in Turkey completed two questionnaires which…

Learning a visual language gives hearing mothers the possibility of participating in their deaf children's culture. Yet, mothers also grapple with the demands of an unmarked global hearing culture, especially as their children's deafness becomes mediated by technology and medical intervention, under the guise of progress, social mobility, equity,…

Children's language and cognitive development are informed by adult spoken language and parental literacy behaviors, although their relative contributions have not been evaluated. Using digital audio-recorders, we unobtrusively observed the spoken language of 107 children, aged 24 to 48 months (M = 32, SD = 6.5), and their families over 3 days (M…

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, "sound symbolism," or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these…

A phonological deficit constitutes a primary cause of developmental dyslexia, which persists into adulthood and can explain some aspects of their reading impairment. Nevertheless, some dyslexic adults successfully manage to study at university level, although very little is currently known about how they achieve this. The present study…

Two experiments with one hundred and fourteen 3- to 5-year-old children examined whether children understand that a printed word represents a specific spoken word and that it differs in this way from a drawing. When an experimenter read a word to children and then a puppet used a different but related label for it, such as "dog" for the…

To learn to produce speech, infants must effectively monitor and assess their own speech output. Yet very little is known about how infants perceive speech produced by an infant, which has higher voice pitch and formant frequencies compared to adult or child speech. Here, we tested whether pre-babbling infants (at 4-6 months) prefer listening to…

Social network analysis (SNA) examines the relationships that an individual speaker creates and maintains with others in order to explain and predict language behavior. Over the past 20 years, SNA has been used by a growing number of researchers to better understand the language learner and the language learning process, especially in the context…

Given the changing demographics of young children served by U.S. schools, educational equity practices must include ways of sustaining cultural heritage practices of children from ethno-linguistic, minoritized, and under-resourced communities. In the present study, we partnered with a bilingual Head Start serving mostly children of immigrant…

This study compared Korean adult learners' English speech in dialogic and monologic tasks, measuring 57 college students' oral proficiency in terms of holistic and analytic grades. The statistical analyses were focused on two questions: (1) how much do the holistic grades of oral proficiency and analytic grades of the four linguistic features…

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these…

This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and…