The association between decontextualized talk (DT; i.e., talk extending beyond immediate context) and child language outcomes is well-attested but not well-understood. This study tested the hypothesis that DT is more linguistically complex than contextualized talk (CT). Thirty-eight Norwegian children (M[subscript age] = 5.5 years; 25 girls; 30…

This article examines multilingual language use in two groups of children, one group at a state school, and one at a private IB school. The IB school has earlier been assumed to reflect an 'elite' multilingualism. Three research questions are posed: to what extent is the children's language use multilingual, what are their typological profiles,…

Purpose: The aims of this study were (a) to examine the relationship between speech intelligibility at the age of 5 years and literacy skills at the age of 8 years, (b) to explore the possible mediating or moderating role of broader language skills at 5 years in the relationship of interest, and (c) to assess whether the potential risk factors…

While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

Critical theoretical approaches to the concept of recognition emphasise the Hegelian concept of a morally motivated struggle to obtain an identity that can be characterised as authentic. This paper takes the concept of a struggle for recognition, Erwing Goffman's concept of "passing", and the cross-disciplinary concept of languaging as…

This study adds to the current literature by examining how different developmental areas (language problems or externalizing and internalizing behaviour problems) affect the possibility of a child receiving extra support early in life. The data were drawn from an online survey of 2779 children in Norway conducted in 2015 and included information…

While most early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs taken to scale in the United States have served socially disadvantaged 3- to 5-years-olds, Norway scaled up universal ECEC from age 1. We investigated the consequences of Norway's universal ECEC scale-up for children's early language skills, exploiting variation in ECEC coverage across…

There is considerable evidence that high-quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is associated with children's language competence. Yet, studies in contexts of universal access to quality-regulated ECEC are rarer, exacerbating concerns over selection bias endemic to non-experimental work on the topic. Extending the cumulative knowledge…

The "Given-before-New" principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the…

Extensive research emphasises the importance of parental involvement for children's learning and academic achievement. This paper reports from a Norwegian study researching parents' experiences on follow-up after their child's cochlear implantation. Within this context, parental involvement is suggested to be of major importance for the child's…

This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0 ; 8 and 3 ; 0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data…

This article investigates the acquisition of object shift in Norwegian child language. We show that object shift is complex derivationally, distributionally, and referentially, and propose a new analysis in terms of IP-internal topicalization. The results of an elicited production study with 27 monolingual Norwegian-speaking children (ages…

The purpose of the study reported in this article was to investigate conversations involving dialogue and negotiation of meaning, through which children will learn to talk and talk to learn. In kindergarten children will learn both to listen to language and to use language, but we have few studies of what characterises the qualities of their…

In a bilingual context, the mother tongue plays a key role in a child's social and personal development, in education and in second-language learning. There is a complex relationship between these three areas. Support for children receiving education through a second language is often in the form of additional learning opportunities in the second…

Investigated Icelandic and Norwegian children's knowledge of the past tense of verbs. Researchers systematically manipulated verb characteristics (type frequency, token frequency, and phonological coherence). These factors played an important role in the acquisition of the two languages. The predominant source of errors in children shifted during…