Based on findings from a variety of research, Shin and Miller (2022) propose a 4-step process that children go through as they learn sociolinguistic variation. Their proposal raises many interesting questions that should inspire future research. Here, I discuss their Step 1 -- the stage in which, according to their proposal, children produce only…

This dissertation is a program evaluation of the Building Blocks of Comprehension vocabulary program, which was first implemented during the 2019-2020 school year by the English department at the school site. The study aimed to investigate the impact of morphological instruction on student vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension.…

Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun ("The key to the cabinets were…"). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining…

Recent studies have demonstrated that saccadic programming in reading is not only determined by low-level visual factors. High-level morphological effects on saccade have been shown in two morphologically rich languages. In the present study, we examined the underlying mechanism of such morphological influences by comparing the processes of…

Identifying wordlike units in language is typically done by applying a battery of criteria, though how to weight these criteria with respect to one another is currently unknown. We address this question by investigating whether certain criteria are also used as cues for learning an artificial language--if they are, then perhaps they can be relied…

A significant number of individuals with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) exhibit language difficulties. Here, we examined the language-related brain morphometry in 59 participants (7 participants with TSC and comorbid autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (TSC + ASD), 13 with TSC but no ASD (TSC-ASD), 10 with ASD-only (ASD), and 29 typically developing…

Limited research has been conducted on the literacy skills of Arabic-speaking refugee children. This study investigated the concurrent and longitudinal roles of morphological awareness in Arabic word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 75 Syrian refugee children aged 6-13 years resettled in Canada were administered measures of nonverbal…

Purpose: This study used structural equation modeling to investigate the dimensionality of language in Spanish-English bilingual kindergartners. Five theoretical models were compared, including (a) a unidimensional model; (b) a two-dimensional model by language (Spanish, English); (c) a three-dimensional model by domain of language (phonology,…

Verb morphology difficulties have been widely attested in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak English and other languages. This research contributes data on a variety of Arabic, a richly inflected Semitic language. The current study examined the production of subject-verb agreement morphology in three groups of 30…

In the past couple of decades, machine translation (MT), whether phrase-based statistical or neural MT, has made considerable progress and has become increasingly common in specialised translation workflows. More studies on MT in legal contexts have been conducted in the past several years, and MT has been and continues to be used in international…

This study aims to shed light on the contribution of universal versus language specific factors on reading. We examined eye movements of Arabic readers and analyzed effects specific to Arabic such as perceptual complexity, diglossia and morphology, in addition to universal factors such as word length and frequency. Twenty native Arabic speakers…

It is well established that children's reading comprehension is driven, at least in part, by their awareness of morphemes, or the smallest units of meaning in language. The question of how it does so is largely open; this mechanistic knowledge would specify theories of reading comprehension and guide effective classroom instruction. We report here…

A Q-matrix is a binary matrix that defines the relationship between items and latent variables and is widely used in diagnostic classification models (DCMs), and can also be adopted in multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) models. The construction process of the Q-matrix is typically carried out by experts in the subject area of the items…

A Q-matrix is a binary matrix that defines the relationship between items and latent variables and is widely used in diagnostic classification models (DCMs), and can also be adopted in multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) models. The construction process of the Q-matrix is typically carried out by experts in the subject area of the items…

Studying Biblical Hebrew is increasingly considered a viable option for students with dyslexia. This presents particular challenges not just for the students but also for their teachers, because the pedagogical methods for teaching ancient languages have traditionally depended on strategies that create difficulties for dyslexic students. This…