This study aims to describe the relationships between child-internal and child-external factors and the consonant accuracy of bilingual children. More specifically, the study looks at internal factors: expressive and receptive vocabulary, and external factors: language exposure and language status, of a group of 4-year-old bilingual Arabic-French…

Perturbations to the speech articulators induced by frequently using an interfering object during infancy (i.e., pacifier) might shape children's language experience and the building of conceptual representations. Seventy-one typically developing third graders performed a semantic categorization task with abstract, concrete and emotional words.…

Lexical stress is useful for a number of language learning tasks. In particular, it helps infants segment the speech stream and identify phonetic contrasts. Recent work has demonstrated that infants aged 1 ; 0 can learn two novel words differing only in their stress pattern. In the current study, we ask whether infants aged 1 ; 0 store stress…

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…

This study explores the form of representational gestures produced by forty-five hearing children (age range 2 ; 0-3 ; 1) asked to label pictures in words. Five pictures depicting objects and five pictures depicting actions which elicited more representational gestures were chosen for more detailed analysis. The range of gestures produced for each…

Young children learning English are biased to attend to the shape of solid rigid objects when learning novel names. This study seeks further understanding of the processes that support this behavior by examining a previous finding that three-year-old children are also biased to generalize novel names for objects made from deformable materials by…

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the…

Investigates one plausible source of the emergence of phonological awareness--phonological neighborhood density in a group of 5-year-old children, most of whom were pre-readers. Subjects with a high vocabulary age showed neighborhood density effects in a rhyme oddity task, but 5-year-olds with lower vocabulary ages did not. (Author/VWL)

Examines why children have difficulty with homonymy. Two experiments were conducted. Children, ages 3 and 4 years, had to select or judge another person's selection of a different object with the same name, avoiding identical objects and misnomers. Older children were successful, but younger children failed these tasks. (Author/VWL)

Twelve children (mean age 4;1) interacted with their mothers in 2 conversational settings to explore the percentage of topic incorporation and collaboration processes used by mothers and children in play and help settings. Although the help setting appeared to support collaborative action, the play setting permitted the dyads to be informative…