Research Findings: Early childhood teachers' talk is a key ingredient in children's early language and literacy development, but there has been little systematic synthesis of observational studies that examine relationships between teacher talk and child oral language. In this systematic review of 54 studies, we investigate and synthesize the…

Narrative is the art of conveying a sequence of causally and temporally linked events through monologic telling. Various functions can be served through narratives including sharing experiences, expressing ideas, providing entertainment, and imparting cultural or social values. Narrative language represents an authentic type of language that is…

We report on our analysis of talk during an assessment task where we asked children living in northern Canadian communities to draw and write about activities they share with family and friends in their daily lives. We introduce a language as context approach to assessing young children's (ages 4-6 years) literacy and sociocultural knowledge,…

Research Findings: The present study investigates both the proximal processes and contextual influences on children's oral language development in preschool. We examine whether teacher language practices vary across activity settings and program type, which teacher language practices predict children's oral language skills, and potential…

Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

The present study examines the association of micro- and macrostructural components in narrative retells within and across languages in Spanish-English bilingual Latino kindergarten children. Using a within-subject research design, fourteen Spanish-English speaking Latino kindergarten children were individually read a scripted picture book, after…

This study examined potential differences in vocabulary found in picture books and adult's speech to children and to other adults. Using a small sample of various sources of speech and print, Hayes observed that print had a more extensive vocabulary than speech. The current analyses of two different spoken language databases and an assembled…

This article addresses the effect of communicative activity on the use of language and gesture by school-age children. The present study examined oral narratives and explanations produced by children aged six and ten years on the basis of several linguistic and gestural measures. Results showed that age affects both gestural and linguistic…

Using an observational task followed by an experimental task with an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, we examined the effect of input on children's acquisition of class extension rules by investigating the relationship between the amount of polysemous noun-verb pairs in French-speaking 2-year-olds' input and both their spontaneous…

Purpose: This study had 4 primary purposes: (a) to describe the oral narrative performance of typically developing African American prekindergarten children with commonly used macro- and microstructure measures; (b) to examine the concurrent and (c) predictive relations between narrative performance, spoken dialect use, vocabulary, and story…

This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task).…

The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. "no sleep", "not see", "can't reach") from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3-3;4 (MLU 2.05-3.1) and his mother. The…

Examines the age at which and the form in which children produce speech acts which commit them to a future action. Results revealed that all of the four- to 11-year-olds produced directive speech acts, but only the older children used the explicit performative verb "promise" to reassure the hearer of their commitment. (Author/CB)

Describes a study of the use of the terms "will" and "gonna" in the speech of two three-year-old girls. The results suggest that one of the functions of "will" and "gonna" is to impart different causal relations to the two practices of "undertaking" and "planning." (HTH)

Analyzes data regarding children's early talk about past experiences, resulting from longitudinal home observations of five working-class mothers and their two-year-olds. Results indicate that children talked primarily of negative past events, especially those involving physical harm, and that during this period temporally-ordered sequences…