Both participation and argumentation (OECD, 2022) are important keywords in educational contexts. While participation is seen as a crucial prerequisite for education and collaborative learning in general, argumentation as a discursive practice serves to convey and negotiate--also school-specific--knowledge. This paper explores repetition in…

Purpose: Talkers adapt their speech according to the demands of their listeners and the communicative context, enhancing the properties of the signal (pitch, intensity) and/or properties of the code (enhancement of phonemic contrasts). This study asked how mothers adapt their child-directed speech (CDS) in ways that might serve the immediate goals…

Inspired by research in language play and linguistic ethnography, this article examines children's language play in early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a locally situated generic practice created through children's semiotic repertoires. The article is based on video-recorded linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish day care centre.…

Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…

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…

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: In typically developing (TD) children, gesture emerges around 9 months of age, allowing children to communicate prior to speech. Due to the important role gesture plays in the early communication of autistic and TD children, various tasks have been used to assess gesture ability. However, few data exist on whether and how tasks…

We investigated the effect of part of speech adoption on the utterance length of Mandarin-speaking children. A total of 209 typically developing Taiwanese children aged 3-6 years participated in the study. They included 90 boys and 119 girls recruited from preschools in Miaoli City, New Taipei City, and Taipei City. We collected children's…

Using data from a longitudinal German large-scale study and structural equation modeling, this study investigated the effects of different dimensions of the early home learning environment (HLE) as well as the effect of language-related preschool quality at the age of 3 to 5 years on students' later school-relevant language proficiency (as…

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

Background: Oral language competence provides children with an essential foundation for academic achievement and emotional well-being, yet many children enter school with delayed language and those living in economically disadvantaged areas are at disproportionate risk of experiencing language difficulties. A tiered system, offering high-quality…

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…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

This article explores the role of the reportative BIN in Yucatec Maya language acquisition and socialization among children aged 4 years and above, focusing on their interactions during pretend play. Building upon prior research on caregivers' strategic use of BIN, the study aims to elucidate the nuanced meanings and functions of the reportative…