Inflectional morphology provides a unique platform for a discussion of whether morphological productivity is rule-based or analogy-based. The present study testing 140 children ("range" = 29 to 97 months; M(SD) = 64.1(18.8)) on an elicited production task investigated the acquisition of the irregular distribution in the Turkish aorist.…

Background: Tamil is a member of the Dravidian language family, and it is spoken extensively in several South Asian countries, including India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore. The phonological development of Tamil-speaking children is examined in the current study within the context of lexical development by including children with typical…

This scoping review investigates the current landscape of developmental language disorders research within Sub-Sahara Africa, specifically examining challenges related to assessment, diagnosis, and management. A comprehensive literature search across three electronic databases yielded 20 relevant articles, primarily from South Africa and Nigeria.…

Purpose: Typically developing multilingual children's speech may include mismatches and phonological patterns that are atypical in monolingual peers. One possible reason for mismatches is cross-linguistic transfer, when structures unique to one language are used while speaking another language. This study explored cross-linguistic transfer in…

Children's language development can reflect the developmental process of children's cognition and social emotions. The present study focuses on preschool children's conversational competence and narrative competence, aiming at exploring developmental features of preschool children's pragmatic competence through analyzing data from self-built oral…

This study investigated whether Korean children follow the acquisition pattern predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and the relationship between caretakers' and children's speech. Accordingly, we analyzed a Korean corpus (Ryu-Corpus) on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), which comprised longitudinal…

Purpose: The Arabic verb system features a nonlinear root and pattern derivational morphology. Previous studies suggest that young Arabic and Hebrew speakers' early verb use is based on semantic complexity rather than derivational morphological structure. The present study examines the role of morphological and semantic complexity in the emergence…

Observed parental sensitivity during a parent-child teaching task and free-play task was tested as mediators of the association between family socioeconomic risk and child receptive language at 48 months, consistent with family investment theory. Parents (n = 881 mothers; 624 fathers, data collected between 2006-2008) and their 5-month-old…

This article examines the determinants of Syrian refugee students' language comprehension difficulties in Lebanon, Türkiye and Australia, three host countries offering refugees different types of legal status (short-term, medium-term and long-term legal settlement). To understand the influence of legal status and its corresponding educational…

Associative anaphora refers to a discourse operation that links a definite determiner phrase (DP) to an antecedent that acts as an indirect referent of the definite DP. For example, in the sequence 'I bought a laptop. The keyboard was black', the definite DP 'the keyboard' is linked to 'a laptop', meaning 'the keyboard of the laptop'. The…

Background: There is a global need for synthetic speech development in multiple languages and dialects, as many children who cannot communicate using their natural voice struggle to find synthetic voices on high-technology devices that match their age, social and linguistic background. Aims: To document multiple stakeholders' perspectives…

Background: Parents play a key role in their child's early development but evidence that parental engagement strategies are effective is unclear. The current study evaluated a parent-delivered early language teaching programme that aimed to support children's early language and literacy skills. Methods: A multisite, pupil-level randomised…

This paper describes a research collaboration with Humber Museums Partnership, which explored family museum visiting and early language. Drawing from ethnographic observations and continuous audio recordings, this article examines how very young children make sense in museum spaces. We activate Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain…

Purpose: Our study analyzes probabilistic constraints on subject expression previously found in adult Spanish in the speech of typically developing (TD) Spanish-speaking children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Previous work shows that children with DLD produce fewer overt subjects than typically developing children, and…

In early childhood centres, decontextualised talk is often associated with literacy activities. In this study, however, we investigated toddler-educator conversations across various activities with a focus on those about topics that were not related to the immediate context. We examined the communicative purposes and linguistic features of these…