About this Research Topic

Background

Our goal is to assemble studies that explain how language use evolves from childhood through adolescence up to adulthood, in later language developments (LLD). Contributors are expected to examine discourse practices in diverse communicative contexts focusing on the various factors – linguistic, neurobiological, cognitive, socio-cultural, and affective – that may interact to mold such practices.

Why focus on LLD?
By five years of age, children have become native speakers – they have mastered the sound system, vocabulary, and the basic grammar of the language (or languages) in which they are raised. However, being a native speaker of a language does not guarantee proficiency in the different realms of experience mediated by verbal communication – gossiping with a friend, attempting to understand a scientific essay, discussing current events at a family dinner, distinguishing between possible and impossible contingencies during a physics lesson, telling jokes in a school break, and/or using idioms, metaphors, and ironic expressions for expressing one’s own feelings. Thus, our focus is on the transition from native to proficient language usage in different realms of experience and languages.

What do we mean by discourse practices?
Here, this refers to the processing and/or generation of discourse which can be multimodal and/or generated in multimodal contexts. Consequently, discourse practices can be examined considering linguistic output only or in conjunction with multimodal factors. For example, in examining spoken language production, account may be taken not only of verbal expression but also prosody, gestures, and body language; for written and digital productions, one may consider both alphabetical and extra-alphabetical features such as graphics like emoticons, drawings, graphs. Similarly, in analyzing the receptive uses of language, verbal, pictorial, and other kinds of graphic resources could function as input in order to examine how these interact with the so-called “independent” variables (maturational, sociocultural, affective, and so on).

Interactions are inevitable in the development of discourse practices and therefore, researchers should take them into account to understand the complex processes that are involved in receptive and productive uses of language. Interaction refers here to the reciprocal and dynamic influence between entities meaning that the behavior or characteristics of one entity affect and is affected by the behavior or characteristics of another entity, while ‘dynamic’ points to changes over time and in the contexts of reciprocal interactions. To illustrate, at later stages, a complex interplay of age, sociocultural, instructional, and genre factors underlies the precedence of the narrative over the more protracted command of different types of expository discourse; speakers’ personal beliefs and attitudes interact with input information to modulate the processing of scientific discourse. Studies also show that the integration of visual and verbal information may affect the interpretation of hypothetical statements in interaction with age and language development.

We hope to get original research and review articles based on a diversity of sources of evidence such as corpora of oral, written, and digital texts, blog posts, surveys, clinical and structured interviews, experiments, and quasi-experiments elicited from children and adolescents, and adults in different languages, mono/bi/multilingual and looking also looking across groups of disadvantaged children/adolescents.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: psycholinguistics, later language development, discursive practices, communicative contexts, multimodality

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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