In this study we evaluated the predictive validity of conceptual scoring. Two independent samples of Spanish-speaking language minority preschoolers (Sample 1: N = 96, mean age = 54.51 months, 54.3% male; Sample 2: N = 116, mean age = 60·70 months, 56.0% male) completed measures of receptive, expressive, and definitional vocabulary in their first…

Considerable research has demonstrated that English-speaking children extend nouns on the basis of shape. Here we asked whether the development of this bias is influenced by the structure of a child's primary language. We tested English- and Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 1 ; 10 and 3 ; 4 in a novel noun generalization task. Results…

We present morphological analyses of verb inflections produced by 15 Spanish-speaking children (age range: 1;7 to 4;7) taken from longitudinal and cross-sectional samples of spontaneous speech and narratives. Our main observation is the existence of a dissociation between regular and irregular processes in the distribution of errors: regular…

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range=1;3-3;1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar…