Expressive vocabulary intervention for four 2- to 3-year-old children with cerebral palsy and speech/language difficulties: A single-case A-B study.

PURPOSE: To evaluate a parent-delivered expressive vocabulary intervention using focused stimulation for young children with cerebral palsy (CP). METHOD: A single case A-B design was used. Use of expressive target words was evaluated during the baseline (A) and intervention (B) phases. Untrained expressive words were used as control behaviour. Four 2- to 3-year-old boys with CP and their parents participated. All participants had an expressive vocabulary of less than 50 words at study intake. Following training, parents delivered the intervention daily at home for 5 weeks. Generalisation of the intervention was measured with a parent-rated vocabulary checklist. RESULT: Two participants showed clear gains and one participant showed a smaller gain in target words. Two of these three participants did not improve on control words, but one participant increased his use of both target and control words. One participant did not increase his use of either control or target words. All participants improved on parent-reported expressive vocabulary, and for two children, improvements were large. CONCLUSION: Parent-delivered focused stimulation may lead to gains in expressive vocabulary in children with CP and speech and language difficulties. The intervention would be suitable for larger single-case studies with more experimental control.

From developmental theory to effective training: long-term and transfer effects of promoting the quantity-to-number word linkage in first-graders at risk for mathematical difficulties.

Introduction: The model of quantity-to-number word linkage (QNL model) identifies relevant milestones in the process of early numerical acquisition and describes a developmental sequence that can guide the fostering of foundational mathematical abilities in at-risk children. While there is substantial evidence for the predictive value of the quantity-number competencies (QNC) described by the model, evidence supporting the preventive potential of interventions targeting these QNC is so far largely restricted to short-term effects. Findings regarding their long-term preventive impact, especially in terms of transfer to mathematical school achievement, are still limited. This quasi-experimental study aimed to address this gap by evaluating the long-term transfer effects of an intervention program that is strictly derived from the QNL model of mathematical development [QNL training; in German "Mengen, zählen, Zahlen" (MZZ)]. Methods: We assessed the quantity-number competencies of 575 first-graders and identified 119 of them as being at risk for mathematical learning difficulties, who were then assigned to three experimental conditions. Sixty one children received 12 sessions of the QNL training, while 30 underwent training in inductive reasoning. Another 28 children served as a control group, receiving no specific intervention. Results and Discussion: Multi-level analyses confirmed both significant short-and long-term effects in the specifically trained quantity-number competencies as well as transfer effects on subsequent mathematical school achievement. In accordance with previous findings, transfer effects of the QNL training on mathematical school achievement were not yet evident immediately after the intervention but turned out to be significant after a delay of 6 months and remained stable even 15 months after training. Effect sizes ranged from d = 0.32 to d = 1.12. These findings both underscore the preventive potential of interventions that are strictly driven by developmental theory and, conversely, support the theoretical assumptions of the QNL model.

Tracking Changes for Inter-Version Interoperability in Heterogeneous Evolving Medical Terminologies.

INTRODUCTION: Medical terminologies and code systems, which play a vital role in the health domain, are rarely static but undergo changes as knowledge and terminology evolves. This includes addition, deletion and relabeling of terms, and, if terms are organized hierarchically, changing their position. Tracking these changes may become important if one uses multiple versions of the same terminology and interoperability is desired. METHOD: We propose a new method for automatic change tracking between terminology versions. It consists of a declarative import pipeline, which translates source terminologies into a common data model. We then use semantic and lexical change detection algorithms. They produce an ontology-based representation of terminology changes, which can be queried using semantic query languages. RESULTS: The method proves accurate in detecting additions, deletions, relocations and renaming of terms. In cases where inter-version term mapping information is provided by the publisher, we were able to highly enhance the ability to differentiate between simple additions/deletions and refinements/consolidation of terms. CONCLUSION: The method proves effective for semi-automatic change handling if term refinements and consolidation are relevant and for automatic change detection if additional mapping information is available.

The Web-based Open-access Reliable Decision on Synonyms (WORDS) English Vocabulary Test.

A quick and reliable test of vocabulary knowledge is a vital component of many studies looking at a range of language processing skills. Recent proliferation of online (web-based) research has generated a growing need for reliable open-access vocabulary tests that can be administered online. This data report presents the newly developed 30-item Web-based Open-access Reliable Decision on Synonyms (WORDS) English Vocabulary Test. In Experiment 1, we tested 109 participants (age range: 18-69 years) on an initial set of 51 potential multiple-choice test items in which participants read a target word (e.g., ubiquitous) and selected a (near-)synonym (e.g., omnipresent) from among three semantically unrelated foils (e.g., interpersonal, catatonic, voluminous). We conducted an item response theory analysis of participants' accuracy data to select an optimal subset of 30 items to include in the final version of the test. In Experiment 2, we verified the reliability of this 30-item version in a different sample (N = 121; 18-79 years); reliability (internal consistency) was good (Cronbach's α = 0.82). We confirmed that, consistent with numerous previous studies, (1) responses were more accurate and quicker for more frequent compared to less frequent words, and (2) older adults showed greater vocabulary knowledge compared to younger adults. The WORDS test takes on average 4 minutes (5 minutes 40 seconds including consent/debrief) to complete. It can be freely accessed via Gorilla Open Materials (https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/694887), allowing ease of use and for useful comparisons between data collected by different researchers.

Bilingualism and second-order theory of mind development in autistic children over time: Longitudinal relations with language, executive functions, and intelligence.

Theory of Mind has long been studied as a core weakness in autism spectrum disorder due to its relationship with social reciprocity, while bilingualism has been shown to compensate for autistic individuals' mentalizing weaknesses. However, our knowledge of the Theory of Mind developmental trajectories of bilingual and monolingual autistic children, as well as of the factors related to Theory of Mind development in autism spectrum disorder is still limited. The current study has examined first- and second-order Theory of Mind skills in 21 monolingual and 21 bilingual autistic children longitudinally across three time points, specifically at ages 6, 9, and 12, and also investigated associations between Theory of Mind trajectories and trajectories of the children's language, intelligence and executive function skills. The results reveal that bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual peers in second-order Theory of Mind at ages 9 and 12, and that intelligence and, especially, expressive vocabulary skills played a pivotal role in advancing bilingual autistic children's second-order Theory of Mind development. On the other hand, monolingual autistic children only managed to capitalize on their language and intelligence resources at age 12. The findings highlight the importance of investigating bilingualism effects on autistic children's advanced cognitive abilities longitudinally.

Initiating a One Digital Health Unified Terminology (ODH-UT) to Facilitate Community Expansion.

One Digital Health (ODH) merges the Digital Health and One Health approaches to create a comprehensive framework for future health ecosystems. In this rapidly evolving field, a standardized vocabulary is not just a convenience, but a necessity to ensure efficient communication. This research proposes the development of a "One Digital Health-Unified Terminology" (ODH-UT) to facilitate communication among researchers and practitioners in Digital Health and One Health, addressing this crucial need.

CLARA-MeD Tool - A System to Help Patients Understand Clinical Trial Announcements and Consent Forms in Spanish.

We present an NLP web-based tool to help users understand consent forms (CFs) and clinical trial announcements (CTAs) in Spanish. For complex word identification, we collected: 1) a lexicon of technical terms and simplified synonyms (14 465 entries); and 2) a glossary (70 547 terms) with explanations from sources such as UMLS, the NCI dictionary, Orphadata or the FDA. For development, we extracted entities from 60 CTAs, 60 CFs and 60 patient information documents (PIDs). To prepare definitions for new terms, we used ChatGPT and experts validated them (28.99% needed to be fixed). We tested the system on 15 new CTAs, 15 CFs, and 15 PIDs, and we achieved an average F1 score of 82.91% (strict match) and of 94.65% (relaxed). The tool is available at: http://claramed.csic.es/demo.

Association between adolescent alcohol use and cognitive function in young adulthood: A co-twin comparison study.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Studies on adolescent alcohol use and cognition are often unable to separate the potential causal effects of alcohol use on cognition from shared etiological influences, including genetic influences or other substance use comorbidities also known to be associated with cognition, such as nicotine use. The present study aimed to fill this gap and clarify the relationship between adolescent alcohol use and young adult cognition by accounting for both measured and unmeasured confounders. DESIGN: A random effects model accounting for nesting in families was used to control for measured confounders. Next, co-twin comparisons were conducted within the full sample and in monozygotic twin pairs (MZ) to control for unmeasured genetic and environmental confounders shared by co-twins. PARTICIPANTS/SETTING: Participants were 812 individuals (58.6% female, 361 complete pairs, 146 MZ pairs) from the longitudinal FinnTwin12 study in Finland. MEASUREMENTS: Adolescent alcohol use was indexed with measures of frequency of use and intoxication averaged across ages 14 and 17. Cognitive outcomes were measured at average age 22 and included Trail Making Test, California Stroop test, Wechsler Adult Intelligence subtests (Vocabulary, Block Design, Digit Symbol), Digit Span subtest of Wechsler Memory Scale, Mental Rotation Test and Object Location Memory test. Covariates included sex, parental education, general cognitive ability, current alcohol use and nicotine use. FINDINGS: Greater frequency of alcohol use and frequency of intoxication across adolescence was associated with decreased vocabulary scores in the co-twin control [freq: stnd beta = -0.12, 95% confidence interval (CI) = -0.234, -0.013] and MZ only co-twin control models (freq: stnd beta = -0.305, 95% CI = -0.523, -0.087; intox: stnd beta = -0.301, 95% CI = -0.528, -0.074). CONCLUSIONS: In Finland, there appears to be little evidence that adolescent alcohol use causes cognitive deficits in young adulthood, except modest evidence for association of higher adolescent alcohol use with lower young adult vocabulary scores.

The effect of visual speech cues on neural tracking of speech in 10-month-old infants.

While infants' sensitivity to visual speech cues and the benefit of these cues have been well-established by behavioural studies, there is little evidence on the effect of visual speech cues on infants' neural processing of continuous auditory speech. In this study, we investigated whether visual speech cues, such as the movements of the lips, jaw, and larynx, facilitate infants' neural speech tracking. Ten-month-old Dutch-learning infants watched videos of a speaker reciting passages in infant-directed speech while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. In the videos, either the full face of the speaker was displayed or the speaker's mouth and jaw were masked with a block, obstructing the visual speech cues. To assess neural tracking, speech-brain coherence (SBC) was calculated, focusing particularly on the stress and syllabic rates (1-1.75 and 2.5-3.5 Hz respectively in our stimuli). First, overall, SBC was compared to surrogate data, and then, differences in SBC in the two conditions were tested at the frequencies of interest. Our results indicated that infants show significant tracking at both stress and syllabic rates. However, no differences were identified between the two conditions, meaning that infants' neural tracking was not modulated further by the presence of visual speech cues. Furthermore, we demonstrated that infants' neural tracking of low-frequency information is related to their subsequent vocabulary development at 18 months. Overall, this study provides evidence that infants' neural tracking of speech is not necessarily impaired when visual speech cues are not fully visible and that neural tracking may be a potential mechanism in successful language acquisition.

Gilberti project and the creation of a linguistic dataset: Conservation and linguistic study of the P'urhépecha language.

This document provides a dataset transcription and translation of unpublished texts in the P'urhépecha language. The preserved texts are of a religious nature, reflecting the evangelizing efforts of missionaries during the 17th to 19th centuries, with a specific emphasis on the initiatives undertaken by the Gilberti Project at the Center for the Study of Traditions of El Colegio de Michoacán. The investigation introduces innovative digital tools and editable resources, opening new avenues for the study and preservation of the P'urhépecha language, ensuring its relevance and accessibility for future generations. The Gilberti Project has been active for over two decades, dedicating itself to the analysis of P'urhépecha texts. Beyond its academic role, the project significantly contributes to the conservation and promotion of the p'urhépecha language in several indigenous communities in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, where the language is still alive.

Parental report of vocabulary in 3- to 6-year-old Polish children: Reliable but not valid.

BACKGROUND: For over 30 years, parental reports have been used to study the vocabulary of children under 4 years of age. Research exploring parental checklists as a measure of vocabulary in older children is very limited. Typically, authors of parental checklists report the reliability of the developed tools but do not explore validity in terms of the agreement between parental assessments and the children's actual word knowledge. AIMS: We aimed to explore the reliability and validity of a parental checklist for assessing vocabulary in children aged between 3 and 6 years. Furthermore, we aimed to evaluate the agreement between indirect (parental checklist) and direct (picture naming and picture recognition tasks) assessments of children's vocabulary. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: A group of 94 typically developing monolingual Polish-speaking children aged between 3 and 6 years were first directly tested onsite with picture naming and picture recognition tasks (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks). Subsequently, the participants' parents completed an online checklist containing the same set of 128 items and marked all the words that they had ever heard in their child's spontaneous speech. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: The parental checklist demonstrated very high internal consistency. The scores of the parental checklist and vocabulary tasks were moderately correlated. We compared the total number of words marked by parents and the number of items correctly identified by children in the picture naming and picture recognition tasks. In picture naming, we found no difference between the children's scores and the number of words selected by parents. However, parents selected significantly fewer words than children correctly recognised in the picture recognition task. When data were analysed at the level of individual items (i.e., whether parents selected exactly the same items that children answered correctly), we found that the level of agreement was low. The level of agreement correlated negatively with the children's vocabulary; that is, the more words a child knew, the lower the agreement between the direct measure and the parental checklist. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Parental checklists should be used with caution in children aged between 3 and 6 years, especially if the assessed children have a large vocabulary and if item analysis is planned. Such checklists may be of more use in younger children or in children with limited vocabulary. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject Parental checklists are commonly used to assess the vocabulary of children younger than 4 years of age. Previous research has indicated that parental checklists are reliable in terms of internal consistency and valid in terms of predictive and convergent validity. What this paper adds to the existing knowledge This study introduces a parental checklist designed for assessing the vocabulary of monolingual Polish-speaking children aged between 3 and 6 years. Statistical analyses reveal that while the parental checklist exhibits high reliability, and the scores on the checklist correlate with direct measures of vocabulary, the agreement between parental reports and direct vocabulary measures (i.e., validity) is notably low, particularly when examining individual test items. What are the clinical implications of this work? These findings underscore the importance of exercising caution when using parental vocabulary checklists with children aged between 3 and 6 years. These checklists can serve as a replacement for direct vocabulary tests only when the general/overall score is needed. However, when specific words are the subject of interest, parental reports may not be a valid measure.

Cross-modal interactions in language production: evidence from word learning.

Literate adults are able to produce the same word in different language modalities-for instance, through speaking and writing. Yet how speaking and writing interact is not well understood. The present study takes a new perspective on the question of the co-activation of phonological and orthographic representations in speaking and writing by examining the acquisition of novel words. We tested how novel words get integrated into modality-specific lexicons by biasing novel word acquisition toward speaking or writing and assessing cross-modal transfer at the first stages of learning. Participants learned novel words paired with pictures of novel objects and practiced them overtly through speaking or typing. At test, typed training led to higher recall accuracy than spoken training whether words were recalled through typing or speaking. Performance in typing (RT and durations) benefited more from typed than spoken training. Crucially, performance in speaking did not benefit specifically from spoken training and was similar after spoken or typed training. Results are compatible with an asymmetric integration in the phonological and orthographic lexicons according to the modality of training, with representations created in the orthographic lexicon directly transferring to the phonological lexicon, while the opposite doesn't seem to occur. Cross-modal transfer dynamics are discussed according to the level of lexical activation.

Disentangling the roles of age and knowledge in early language acquisition: A fine-grained analysis of the vocabularies of infant and child language learners.

The words that children learn change over time in predictable ways. The first words that infants acquire are generally ones that are both frequent and highly imageable. Older infants also learn words that are more abstract and some that are less common. It is unclear whether this pattern is attributable to maturational factors (i.e., younger children lack sufficiently developed cognitive faculties needed to learn abstract words) or linguistic factors (i.e., younger children lack sufficient knowledge of their language to use grammatical or contextual cues needed to figure out the meaning of more abstract words). The present study explores this question by comparing vocabulary acquisition in 53 preschool-aged children (M = 51 months, range = 30-76 months) who were adopted from China and Eastern Europe after two and half years of age and 53 vocabulary-matched infant controls born and raised in English speaking families in North America (M = 24 months, range = 16-33 months). Vocabulary was assessed using the MB-CDI Words and Sentences form, word frequency was estimated from the CHILDES database, and imageability was measured using adult ratings of how easily words could be pictured mentally. Both groups were more likely to know words that were both highly frequent and imageable (resulting in an over-additive interaction). Knowledge of a word was also independently affected by the syntactic category that it belongs to. Adopted preschoolers' vocabulary was slightly less affected by imageability. These findings were replicated in a comparison with a larger sample of vocabulary-matched controls drawn from the MB-CDI norming study (M = 22 months, range = 16-30 months; 33 girls). These results suggest that the patterns of acquisition in children's early vocabulary are primarily driven by the accrual of linguistic knowledge, but that vocabulary may also be affected by differences in early life experiences or conceptual knowledge.

Differences in the type of vocabulary understood by deaf and hearing students: Results to guide interventions.

INTRODUCTION: Vocabulary knowledge is an essential element in language development. There is evidence of significant differences in vocabulary knowledge between deaf children and hearing peers of the same age. These differences put deaf students at a disadvantage when compared to their hearing counterparts. The aim of this study was to investigate whether certain types of words characterise the lexical difficulties of deaf students. Our starting point is that this knowledge is needed to design interventions that are adapted to the particular needs of these students for their lexical development. METHODS: We evaluated the lexical comprehension of 90 Spanish students. The sample comprised 45 hearing students and 45 students with severe or profound hearing loss. Both groups were attending the later years of primary school (8 to -12-year-olds). They were tested using the Spanish Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III. The performance of both groups was statistically compared using percentiles and standard scores as well as a selected set of words from the test. RESULTS: No significant differences between hearing and deaf groups were found by age, sex, and sociocultural level. Significant differences were found between groups in their percentile and standard scores. There were no significant differences in performance between the two groups on only five of the 25 words with the highest error rate in the deaf group. The qualitative analysis of the remaining 20 words that were especially challenging for deaf students reveals results of interest which could help guide interventions. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate the need for lexical intervention for deaf students in the final years of primary school. The specialised support service for deaf learners should approach the intervention by targeting a specific type of vocabulary, making the semantic relationships between these words more transparent and promoting a deeper understanding of them.

PETA: evaluating the impact of protein transfer learning with sub-word tokenization on downstream applications.

Protein language models (PLMs) play a dominant role in protein representation learning. Most existing PLMs regard proteins as sequences of 20 natural amino acids. The problem with this representation method is that it simply divides the protein sequence into sequences of individual amino acids, ignoring the fact that certain residues often occur together. Therefore, it is inappropriate to view amino acids as isolated tokens. Instead, the PLMs should recognize the frequently occurring combinations of amino acids as a single token. In this study, we use the byte-pair-encoding algorithm and unigram to construct advanced residue vocabularies for protein sequence tokenization, and we have shown that PLMs pre-trained using these advanced vocabularies exhibit superior performance on downstream tasks when compared to those trained with simple vocabularies. Furthermore, we introduce PETA, a comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating PLMs. We find that vocabularies comprising 50 and 200 elements achieve optimal performance. Our code, model weights, and datasets are available at https://github.com/ginnm/ProteinPretraining . SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION: This study introduces advanced protein sequence tokenization analysis, leveraging the byte-pair-encoding algorithm and unigram. By recognizing frequently occurring combinations of amino acids as single tokens, our proposed method enhances the performance of PLMs on downstream tasks. Additionally, we present PETA, a new comprehensive benchmark for the systematic evaluation of PLMs, demonstrating that vocabularies of 50 and 200 elements offer optimal performance.

Smart Predict: adding partner-suggested vocabulary to increase efficiency in a dual tablet AAC typing application.

Smart Predict is a novel two-tablet application developed to improve conversational efficiency for people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices. The Smart Predict system consists of two distinct applications that were built for use with two Android tablets and/or phones with Bluetooth® capability. One application is referred to as the AAC User app and the second application is called the Partner app. Smart Predict integrates vocabulary supplementation from communication partners in real-time while persons who rely on AAC generate text and maintain full control to choose words within a word prediction line. Using single-case research designs with adapted alternating treatments under two counterbalanced treatment conditions (AAC User app alone versus AAC User app + Partner app), we examined message efficiency with persons who rely on switch scanning for on-screen keyboards. User experience questionnaires were administered to determine satisfaction and workload, and to provide feedback for future development efforts. Three adults with complex communication needs and motor impairments conversed with research staff about fourteen movie trailers. Characters per minute and switch selections per character produced by the person with complex communication needs and motor impairments were measured during 15-minute interviews to represent communication speed and effort. Results indicate that message efficiency increased with the dual-tablet Smart Predict, indicating faster message generation with the vocabulary supplementation system. User satisfaction increased and perceived effort decreased under the Smart Predict conditions. Given these results within a research and development framework, the Smart Predict concept is a viable feature that could be considered within smart AAC technologies.

Exploring the relationship between digital gaming, language attitudes, and academic success in EFL university students.

The potential of digital games in education has been widely discussed, yet there is a significant gap in the literature regarding their influence on foreign language learning, particularly in Central Europe, and using mixed-method research designs. This study aims to fill this gap by providing empirical data from a new cultural context. Using a mixed-method research design, it investigates the impact of gaming on language learning outcomes of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students. A total of 99 Slovak university students of English as a foreign language were selected by convenience sampling, of which 10 were chosen for qualitative interviews to triangulate the data. The results reveal a significant improvement in vocabulary knowledge and a reported increase in positive language attitudes among gamers compared to non-gamers, with no significant difference in grade point averages between the two groups. These findings highlight the potential of digital gaming to enhance vocabulary learning and foster positive attitudes towards language learning among EFL students. Recommendations for future research are provided.

Using semantic verbal fluency to estimate the relative and absolute vocabulary size of bilinguals: An exploratory study of children and adolescents.

INTRODUCTION: The full assessment of bilingual children often involves at least one language for which formal vocabulary tests are lacking and which the examiner does not speak. We examined, in a sample of children with typical development (TD), whether a semantic verbal fluency task, typically used in research as a measure of executive function, could be used in the place of a formal vocabulary test to estimate vocabulary knowledge when formal tests are not available. METHOD: 113 TD monolingual French speakers and TD bilinguals and with varying degrees of exposure to French, age 6 to 17 years, completed tests of vocabulary knowledge and semantic verbal fluency. A subset of 64 participants spoke French and English and were tested in both languages. Verbal fluency measures calculated using a traditional method which uses specific rules for superordinate categories and for animals of different sex and age and a simplified scoring method which simply counts all words produced, included the total number of words produced in each language, Total Vocabulary and Conceptual Vocabulary measures combining both languages, as well as analyses of lexical composition and word frequency within the study sample. RESULTS: Linear regressions revealed that the number of words produced predicted vocabulary size in a language-specific way, with slightly stronger predictions made by the simplified scoring method. As expected, bilinguals produced more words and more unique words in their language of greater exposure, while different exposure groups were equivalent in measures combining both languages, including their Total vocabulary and Conceptual vocabulary. Producing unusual words (infrequently produced in the study sample) indicated higher vocabulary scores. CONCLUSIONS: This study supports the use of the verbal fluency task as a quick and simple tool to obtain a rough estimate of vocabulary size in TD monolinguals and bilinguals. This tool shows promise as well in clinical work with other populations, subject to further verification.

Exposure to Language in Video and its Impact on Linguistic Development in Children Aged 3-11: A Scoping Review.

Early exposure to books can benefit language acquisition by expanding children's linguistic experience and engaging them in a shared activity (Nation et al. 2022; Dowdall et al., 2020). Video media (including television) could potentially fulfil a similar role by exposing children to new linguistic phenomena in an engaging setting. However, while many studies have examined the impact of screen-time on cognitive development (for a review see Kostyrka-Allchorne et al., 2017), the findings relating specifically to language remain unclear. The aim of this review is to understand how encountering language content in video media might impact a variety of language skills in children aged 3-11. This review maps the methods and findings of 93 studies that met preregistered criteria with the goal of understanding which factors impact learning outcomes following video exposure. Results from observational (N = 31) and experimental (N = 62) studies reveal a divided literature in which video viewing is linked to short-term benefits for learning specific linguistic structures from high-quality video media, as well as having negative or null long-term associations with standardised language measures. Results highlight various methodological difficulties and limitations faced by experimental and observational approaches and reveal the importance of video quality and viewing context for language learning.

The effect of type of task on EFL learners' vocabulary learning.

Depth of processing vocabulary has been the subject of heated discussion among vocabulary researchers. Yet, current literature lacks research comparing different tasks to investigate the acquisition of vocabulary knowledge among adult learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). To fill the gap, we designed five task-based groups based on Technique Feature Analysis (TFA) as a framework to predict the effectiveness of different vocabulary learning tasks with similar or different TFA rankings on L2 vocabulary knowledge gain. The participants were 130 EFL learners (mean age = 21.7, female 61.5%) randomly assigned to the vocabulary learning tasks: reading and multiple-choice items (TFA = 6), reading and choosing definitions (TFA = 6), reading and fill-in-the-blanks (TFA = 7), reading and rewording the sentences (TFA = 6) and composition writing (TFA = 8). The results of the study revealed that tasks with the same TFA scores led to similar vocabulary knowledge gains. While predictions of the TFA are partially supported, composition writing and sentence rewording tasks supersede other tasks in terms of their effectiveness in vocabulary acquisition.