Purpose: This preliminary investigation is a longitudinal study of fast mapping skills in normally developing children, 16 to 18 months of age. The purpose was to examine the effects of practice on the accessibility of words in lexical memory. Method: Eight children were taught the names of 24 unfamiliar objects over 12 weekly training sessions. The amount of practice children had with individu...

The present study investigated the developmental interrelationships between play, gesture use and spoken language development in children aged 18–31 months. The children completed two tasks: (i) a structured measure of pretend (or ‘symbolic’) play and (ii) a measure of vocabulary knowledge in which children have been shown to gesture. Additionally, their productive spoken language knowledge was...

Seven- and eight-year-old deaf children and hearing children of equivalent reading age were presented with a number of tasks designed to assess reading, spelling, productive vocabulary, speechreading, phonological awareness, short-term memory, and nonverbal intelligence. The two groups were compared for similarities and differences in the levels of performance and in the predictors of literacy....

The role of individual differences in bridging-inference processing was studied. Students (n = 135) read passages of short to moderate length. After each one, they answered corresponding questions about inferences that bridged causally related ideas that were either near or far apart in the text. The main hypothesis was that local bridging-inference processing is facilitated by the reader's pre...

Background: Cooperative learning as an educational approach plays a crucial role in English as a second/foreign language education. The effective role of cooperative learning seems to be so dominant that it deserves further investigation. Objectives: This study aimed at investigating the impact of cooperative learning strategies on reading comprehension and vocabulary learning of nursing stude...

Over a number of years, action research projects have contributed to practitionerbased research and professional development in the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP). In this article, we describe a recent national project focusing on the teaching of vocabulary. We worked, as a researcher from the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELTR) and a researcher from the NS...

Word and nonword identification skills were examined in a sample of 80 elementary school age students with mild intellectual disabilities and mixed etiologies who were described as struggling to learn to read by their teachers. Performance on measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary, measures of phonological awareness, and measures of word and nonword identification were included for ana...