Do mono- and bilingual children differ in the way they learn novel words in ambiguous settings? Listeners may resolve referential ambiguity by assuming that novel words refer to unknown, rather than known, objects--a response known as the "mutual exclusivity effect." Past research suggested that mono- and bilinguals differ with regard to…

Mental State Talk (MST) is utterances describing invisible mental aspects. The first aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of Parental MST and Child MST and their concurrent association in a Swedish population, and the second aim was to relate these MST measures to the children's general language abilities. Seventy-seven dyads…

Background: Poor intelligibility is common in young children with developmental language disorders (DLDs). Relatedly, children with DLD and poor intelligibility, like children with DLD solely, have often also difficulties in other aspects of language abilities: such as making grammatical and cohesive sentences and telling narratives with an…

This study explored the use of sophisticated vocabulary, complex syntax, and decontextualized language (including book information, conceptual information, past/future experiences, and vocabulary information) in teachers' instructional interactions with children during the literacy block in prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. The sample…

This article uses a 'follow the thing' methodology to trace the trajectory of the so-called word gap from its original conception in 1990s US academic knowledge production through to a teacher education programme and three schools in the north of England, in the mid-2020s. It focuses on one teacher's first encounters, reproduction, and ultimately…

This study focuses on parental use of parentese: the acoustically exaggerated, clear, and higher-pitched speech produced by adults across cultures when they address infants. While previous research shows that parentese enhances language learning and processing, it is still unclear what drives the variability in the amount of parental parentese…

Background: Accurate nonword repetition (NWR) is contingent on many underlying skills, including encoding, memory and motor planning and programming. Though vowel errors are frequently associated with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), several recent studies have found that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) produce high rates of…

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

Young learners are known to extend verb regularity further than it actually is. When it happens, this children's overregularization phenomenon can be a result of several reasons: a failed linguistic development due to confusion between rules and memory, a lack of feedback from adults, and problems with cognitive development. The present study…

Understanding the sequential associations between caregiver responsivity and child communication is pivotal for enhancing child outcomes and guiding effective interventions. This dissertation study evaluates the LENA Start™ on caregiver-child communication, focusing on sequential association between caregiver and child communicative behaviors.…

Cross-linguistically, statements and questions broadly differ in syntactic organization. To learn the syntactic properties of each sentence type, learners might first rely on non-syntactic information. This paper analyzed prosodic differences between infant-directed "wh"-questions and statements to determine what kinds of cues might be…

In Lebanese Arabic, lexical subjects may occur before or after verbs, but only before non-verbal predicates. Analysis of spontaneous language samples from 19 two-year-old children shows that postverbal (VS) and preverbal (SV) subjects emerge simultaneously. The youngest children displayed no VS-SV difference in frequency. A slight preference for…

This study is a validation of the LENA system for the Italian language. In Study 1, to test LENA's accuracy, seventy-two 10-minute samples extracted from daylong LENA recordings were manually transcribed for 12 children longitudinally observed at 1;0 and 2;0. We found strong correlations between LENA and human estimates in the number of Adult Word…

This study explored responsive and linguistic parent input features during parent-child interactions and investigated how four input categories related to children's production of diverse, simple sentences. Of primary interest was parent use of responsive, simple declarative input sentences. Responsive and linguistic features of parent input to 20…

In this article, I advocate for an enriched view of children's linguistic input, with the aim of building sustainable and tangible links between theoretical models of language development and families' everyday experiences. Children's language experiences constrain theoretical models in ways that may illuminate universal learning biases. However,…