Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit,…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb…

Language and numerical development are associated in early childhood. In the present study, we focused on the association of the development of children's cardinality understanding of small numbers and their knowledge on unspecific quantifiers (i.e., many, a few). In a longitudinal study, we pursued the research question whether children's…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…

This article investigates the binding properties of the Korean reflexive "caki." Korean "caki" allows a local antecedent, a long-distance sentence-internal antecedent, and (unusually) an extrasentential antecedent. Two experiments were conducted with Korean-speaking child participants (mean age = 5;8; age range = 5;1-6;4) and…

Iconic gestures illustrate complex meanings and clarify and enrich the speech they accompany. Little is known, however, about how children use iconic gestures in the absence of speech. In this study, we used a cross-sectional design to investigate how 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 51) communicate using pantomime iconic gestures. Children…

The present study aims to examine the relationship between developmental language deficit and children's creative ability. For this purpose, we compared the performance of preschool children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) on general and mathematic creativity tests with that of typically developing children. The findings demonstrated that…

This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-related cues in some tones and duration in all tones…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

Oral narrative retelling is a complex linguistic and cognitive task that has been shown to map onto reading fluency and comprehension. Therefore, it is important to understand oral retelling skill, especially among "emergent bilingual" children--those who are learning two languages simultaneously. In this article, exploratory…

In addition to serving as question markers with interrogative force, "wh"-words such as "shenme" "what" in Mandarin Chinese have a noninterrogative meaning. For the noninterrogative meaning, these words have been typically analyzed as negative polarity items, i.e., as "wh"-pronouns that are similar in…

Kindergarteners (M age = 6;2) were exposed to novel spoken nonwords and their written forms within a storybook reading context. Following each of 12 stories, the children were required to spell and identify 12 novel written nonwords and then verbally produce and comprehend the spoken version of those words. Results indicated the children acquired…