Based on findings from a variety of research, Shin and Miller (2022) propose a 4-step process that children go through as they learn sociolinguistic variation. Their proposal raises many interesting questions that should inspire future research. Here, I discuss their Step 1 -- the stage in which, according to their proposal, children produce only…

Demonstrative words are one of the most important ways of establishing reference in conversation. This work describes Spanish-speaking children's demonstrative production between ages 2 to 10 using data from the CHILDES corpora. Results indicate that children feature all demonstratives in their lexicon -- however, the distal term is scarce…

Based on the linguistic analysis of game explanations and retellings, the paper's goal is to investigate the relation of preschool children's situated discourse competence and iconic gestures in different communicative genres, focussing on reinforcing and supplementary speech-gesture-combinations. To this end, a method was developed to evaluate…

Introduction: It is well documented that preschoolers with DLD produce first instances of sentential complement clause sentences later than same-age peers with typical language. However, it remains unknown whether children with DLD are limited in their production of a variety of sentential complement clause sentences. Aims: Using a sentence…

Purpose: Previous studies documenting longitudinal linguistic outcomes of children with specific language impairment (SLI) compared to their age peers focus on the property of obligatory finiteness marking in sentences across the age span of 5-18 years. This study evaluates tag questions as syntactically complex sentences that extend the demands…

Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to…

Infant-directed speech often has hyperarticulated features, such as point vowels whose formants are further apart than in adult-directed speech. This increased "vowel space" may reflect the caretaker's effort to speak more clearly to infants, thus benefiting language processing. However, hyperarticulation may also result from more…

Background: Language development is critical for children's life chances. Promoting parent-child interactions is suggested as one mechanism to support language development in the early years. However, limited evidence exists for a causal effect of parent-child interactions on children's language development. Methods: Data from the Language in…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Parental language input is a key predictor of child language achievement. Parentese is a widely used style of child-directed speech (CDS) distinguished by a higher pitch and larger pitch range. A recent parent coaching randomized control trial (Parentese-RCT) demonstrated that English-speaking US parents who were coached to use parentese with…

The speech register that adults especially caregivers use when interacting with infants and toddlers, that is, infant-directed speech (IDS) or baby talk, has been reported to facilitate language development throughout the early years. However, the neural mechanisms as well as why IDS results in such a developmental faciliatory effect remain to be…

The current research examined whether children's expectations about labeling conventions can be influenced by limited exposure to a foreign language. Three- to four-year-old Korean children were presented with two speakers who each assigned a novel label either in Korean or Spanish to a novel object. Children were asked whether both labels were…

While there are always differences in children's input, it is unclear how often these differences impact language development -- that is, are developmentally meaningful -- and why they do (or do not) do so. We describe a new approach using computational cognitive modeling that links children's input to predicted language development outcomes, and…

This study investigates how neural networks address the properties of children's linguistic knowledge, with a focus on the "Agent-First" strategy in comprehension of an active transitive construction in Korean. We develop various neural-network models and measure their classification performance on the test stimuli used in a behavioural…

Background: One of the most significant developmental accomplishments is the emergence of language in early childhood. Whilst this process is effortless for most children, others can face significant hurdles. Identifying, in the early years, which children will go on to have developmental language disorder is, however, fraught with several…