Previous work suggests that key factors for replicability, a necessary feature for theory building, include statistical power and appropriate research planning. These factors are examined by analyzing a collection of 12 standardized meta-analyses on language development between birth and 5 years. With a median effect size of Cohen's d = 0.45 and…

The interconnectedness of bilingual memory remains a topic of great debate. Semantic priming provides a powerful methodological tool with which to investigate this issue in early bilingual toddlers. Semantic priming effects were investigated in 21 bilingual toddlers (2.5 years) within and across each of their languages. Results revealed the first…

This study examined abstract syntactic categorization in infants, using the case of grammatical gender. Ninety-six French-learning 14-, 17-, 20-, and 30-month-olds completed the study. In a preferential looking procedure infants were tested on their generalized knowledge of grammatical gender involving pseudonouns and gender-marking determiners.…

In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean length of utterances (MLU). A total of 312 speech samples…

Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in--"subcategorization frames"--to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant…

In 2 experiments, 15- and 21-month-old infants were presented with a target object and asked to select an object taxonomically or thematically related to the target object. The target object was introduced with or without a novel nonsense noun. Results indicated that novel nouns focused infants' attention on taxonomic relations. (MDM)

Findings from studies exploring role of joint attentional focus in children's acquisition of language indicated that language of 24 mothers and their 15- to 21-month-olds inside episodes of joint attentional focus involved more utterances, shorter sentences, more comments, and longer conversations than outside of episodes. Also, object references…

Results from these two studies show that fast mapping--gaining information about a word from how it is used in a sentence, what words it is contrasted with, and other factors--can be used successfully by children two to four years old to form quick and rough hypotheses about the meaning of a word. (PCB)

Abilities of 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children to interpret, judge acceptability of, and produce class extensions were assessed. It was concluded that increasing ability to deal appropriately with class extensions is primarily due to general advances in language acquisition rather than to any development unique to the class-extension word-formation…

Preschoolers interpreted mental verbs with respect to their mental state in contrast to external state. These children were nontheless ignorant of definitive distinctions between the mental verbs, completely confusing cases of remembering, knowing, and guessing. (Author/RH)

Paired English-learning and Spanish-learning infants were tested for perception of two synthetic speech contrasts differing in voice onset time. Results indicate that Spanish-learning infants discriminated both English and Spanish contrasts, while English-learning infants appeared to have discriminated English contrasts only. (JMB)

Investigates the role of imitation by children in the acquisition of lexical items and factors influencing word acquisition by imitation. Imitation did not appear to facilitate subsequent spontaneous use of lexical items. Results are discussed in terms of conditions which influence imitative behavior in children. (JMB)

Kindergarten, third-grade and fifth-grade children were tested on a same-different auditory discrimination task. Word pairs varied in familiarity as well as summed positional frequency of the letters of the words in each pair. Results support the hypothesis that prereaders with normal language experiences develop sensitivities to…

Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., "bih" and "dih") in a laboratory task until 17 months of age ( J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). This study was extended to 14- to 20-month-old…

In two experiments 96 children and eight adults were tested for comprehension of the modifier-head relation in compounds such as apple-knife or were asked to label objects with compounds. Results show that by age three children reliably interpret novel compounds and made use of novel compounds to subcategorize. (RH)