This article presents a developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The literature thus far indicates that the pathway of development involves first producing only…

This book provides targeted suggestions that educators can use to ensure successful teaching and learning with today's growing population of transnational, multilingual students. The text offers insights based on the author's observations, interactions, and interviews with second-generation immigrant children, their families, and their teachers in…

This month's "FlagHouse Forum" focuses on how to choose the communicator best-suited to a child's special need. FlagHouse--a premier global supplier of resources for special needs, education, physical activity and recreation--is pleased to partner with "Exceptional Parent" to bring its readers this informational forum. Humans communicate with each…

Despite the growing body of integrationist literature on the study of language and on a wide range of language-related fields of inquiry, there is as yet no integrationist investigation of the field of language acquisition. This paper argues for the need of an integrationist study of what children learn about language and of how they learn it.…

Early intervention programs are developed on the premise that parents or primary caregivers generalize treatment strategies within naturalistic environments. The diverse characteristics of children within early language intervention reinforce the urgency for services that consider the needs of each child within his or her broader social, cultural,…

Most young children begin developing language skills at a rapid pace, early in their lives. Children with Down syndrome, the most common known genetic cause of intellectual disability, typically experience delays in language development that persist as they grow older. Parents and teachers can naturally reinforce the language skills of a child…

The team of the Unit of Phoniatrics and Logopedics of the Ain Shams University Clinic in Cairo, Egypt, has worked for three and half decades to spread awareness of child language disorders. This involved publications to inform the public, as well as health care professionals, about the needs of children with delayed language, through description…

Noun-class prefixes are obligatory in most Bantu languages. However, the Sotho languages (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi) permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of "unmarked" phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Using…

Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what "or" means in ordinary statements of the form "A or B". Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". An alternative is to suppose that…

In this squib we examine the time course of children's acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kayne's (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional…

Theories of indefinites vary with respect to whether these noun phrases can be treated as quantificational. Although everyone seems to be in agreement that indefinites do not always introduce their own quantificational force, there is widespread disagreement as to whether they ever do. In this article, we present experimental evidence from…

In learning the meaning of a new term, children need to fix its reference, learn its conventional meaning, and discover the meanings with which it contrasts. To do this, children must attend to adult speakers--the experts--and to their patterns of use. In the domain of color, children need to identify color terms as such, fix the reference of each…

This article begins by identifying that children have a spontaneous predilection for playing with language, engaging in poetic discourse even before their first poetry lesson. Although children's language play is relatively unresearched in the classroom, in a case study of two groups of pupils aged between 10 and 11, it was observed that children…

Describes the Human Communication Research Centre Dialogue Database. The database consists of over 700 transcribed and coded dialogues from pairs of speakers aged from 7-14. The speakers are recorded over 2 years while tackling cooperative problem-solving tasks, and the same pairs of speakers are recorded over 2 years tackling 10 different…

This article is about the contributions children make in clinical interviews. This issue is studied by re-analysing a selection of the empirical excerpts used by Piaget in his seminal book The Child's Conception of the World. The focus is on how children use language non-literally, and especially on how they use meta-communicative markers ("as…