Understanding what cognitive mechanisms contribute to successful language acquisition and development has remained an important but elusive goal of the psychological sciences. Current theories suggest that the ability to learn structured sequential patterns – i.e. ,”implicit” or “statistical” learning -may underlie language processing and development. In this paper, we investigate the role that...

this study aimed at examining the major mobile wireless technologies, that is,mobile phones and the possibilities associated with them, currently in use in theeducational domains, with an emphasis on language teaching and learning practices.accordingly, some of the most typical studies using different functions of mobilephones such as e-mail, multimedia capabilities, wireless application protoc...

OBJECTIVE Previous studies have indicated a link between speech-language and literacy development. To add to this body of knowledge, we investigated whether lexical and grammatical skills from toddler to early school age are related to reading competence in adolescence. METHODS Twenty-three typically developing children were followed from age 1;6 to 13;6 (years;months). Parental checklists an...

This paper looks into how preteens with autism (Asperger, PDD-NOS) compare to healthy controls (matched in terms of age, IQ and educational level) in the way they interpret audiovisual expressions produced by adult or child speakers. In previous research, we had recorded utterances from those groups of speakers as they were responding to easy and difficult questions in a quiz-like experiment, s...

the purpose of the present study is the comparison of the pattern of language perception in down syndrome (ds) children and typical children. to achieve the objective, nine subjects with ds (whose mental ages were 72-78 months and were drawn from five center of special education in the city of mashhad) and five typical children with the same mental ages were selected through random sampling; an...

individual’s first language (l1) and second language (l2) communication could be affected by willingness to communicate (wtc) which is considered an influential factor affecting one’s second language development. studying various aspects of wtc has been the home of choice for the researchers in the sla domain (e.g., clement, dornyei, and noels, 1998; mccroskey, & baer, 1985; kang, 2005; macinty...

In this paper we outline our recent research efforts, which introduce data-driven methods in the development of language technology components and applications for African languages. Rather than hard-coding the solution to a particular linguistic problem in a set of hand-crafted rules, data-driven methods try to extract the required linguistic classification properties from annotated corpora of...

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi’an Jiaotong University. He is founder of the Sociocultural Theory...

A large number of computational language learners have been proposed for modelling the process of child language acquisition. Com­ paring them, however, can be difficult due to the different assumptions that they make, the diverse test results presented, and the different linguistic behaviours investigated. This paper introduces a toolkit that allows different lan­ gua...