Children achieve better long-term language outcomes than adults. However, it remains unclear whether children actually learn language "more quickly" than adults during real-time exposure to input--indicative of true superior language learning abilities--or whether this advantage stems from other factors. To examine this issue, we…

Codeswitching is a common feature of bilingual language practices, yet its impact on word learning is poorly understood. Critically, processing costs associated with codeswitching may extend to learning. Moreover, verbs tend to be more difficult to learn than nouns, and the challenges of learning verbs could compound with processing costs…

The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials…

Assessing a child's language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months…

Mandarin classifiers are a complex system, but little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children manage to learn the system. Based on the extant literature, we explored potential factors influencing the comprehension and production of Mandarin shape classifiers, including classifier-based semantic categorization and errors pertaining to the…

This volume presents the findings of a large-scale study of individual differences in spoken (and heard) language development during the school years. The goal of the study was to investigate the degree to which language abilities at school entry were stable over time and influential in the child's overall success in important aspects of…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

Purpose: The authors studied the effect of the cochlear implant (CI) on language comprehension and production in deaf children who had received a CI in the 2nd year of life. Method: The authors evaluated lexical and morphosyntactic skills in comprehension and production in 17 Italian children who are deaf (M = 54 months of age) with a CI and in 2…

The purpose of this article is to examine the language of girls and boys between 8 and 30 months of age, using the Quebec French version of The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. The findings from this parental report measure confirm those of earlier research, which showed the linguistic superiority of girls over boys at a young age.…

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension…

Testing of eight-year-olds (N=159) with a battery of metalinguistic tasks, intelligence, and reading comprehension tests indicated that the relation among performance on metalinguistic tasks was strongest for those tasks relying on the same processing skill component. One of these components was most significant in determining the child's level of…

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age less than 33 weeks and/or birth weight less than 1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term…

Recalls childhood experiences which influenced the author in becoming a writer and a teacher. Explores the symbolic power humans wield with language, which extends from a single word to a phrase to a whole story. (MG)

Three experiments gauging 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to interpret and comprehend figurative language indicated that informative contexts could improve subjects' abilities to perceive idiomatic meanings. Subjects were less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them, but were able to perceive that language can be both figurative and…

Attempts to demonstrate that specifically language-impaired (SLI) children can be viewed as normal learners faced with systematically altered input. By assuming SLI children are limited in their ability to perceive and hypothesize grammatical morphemes that are low in phonetic substance, many features of SLI children's language can be explained by…