This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair…

Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form ("la" noun-"a" and "el" noun-"o"). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of…

The ability to argue and to create alliances with peers are important social competencies for all children, including those who have speech, language and communication needs. In this study, we investigated the management of arguments and alliances by a group of 5-year-old male friends, one of whom has a persisting speech difficulty (PSD). Twelve…

Do video games show demonstrable relationships to academic achievement gains when used to support the K-12 curriculum? In a review of literature, we identified 300+ articles whose descriptions related to video games and academic achievement. We found some evidence for the effects of video games on language learning, history, and physical education…

The aim of this study was to systematically describe the preverbal development of preterm infants from canonical babbling up to the first word and to compare it with that of healthy full-term infants. In addition, the amount of vocalization between the preterm and full-term groups was compared. The sample consisted of 18 preterm infants with…

Purpose: To examine the predictive validity of the Language Use Inventory (LUI), a parent report of language use by children 18-47 months old (O'Neill, 2009). Method: 348 children whose parents had completed the LUI were reassessed at 5-6 years old with standardized, norm-referenced language measures and parent report of developmental history. The…

Purpose: To evaluate the family environments of children with cochlear implants and to examine relationships between family environment and postimplant language development and executive function. Method: Forty-five families of children with cochlear implants completed a self-report family environment questionnaire (Family Environment Scale-Fourth…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to identify whether different patterns of errors exist in irregular past-tense verbs in children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Method: Spontaneous language samples of thirty-one age- and gender-matched pairs of children (total N = 62) between the ages of 24 months and 59 months were…

Infants have been described as "statistical learners" capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential…

Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed…

There are differences and similarities between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and spoken varieties of Arabic, in all language domains. To obtain preliminary insights into interactions between the acquisition of spoken and standard varieties of a language in a diglossic situation, we employed forced-choice grammaticality judgments to investigate…

Research on children's computation of meanings involving the focus operator "only" has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether children's semantic representation of "only" is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing children's knowledge about "only" in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in…

Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated language learning and use. One prevalent feature of natural languages is that they avoid unpredictable variation. The current work explores whether linguistic predictability might…

Preschool may not be a place where formal education is imparted but yes, it definitely is a place where children have their first taste of independence. Preschool education is the provision of education for children before the commencement of statutory education usually between the ages of 2 and 5. Thus the purposes of the study were: to study the…

Over the past 20 years task-based language teaching (TBLT) has become a dominant approach to teaching in many contexts, including schools in New Zealand and the Flemish speaking region of Belgium (East, 2012; Van den Branden, 2006), but there are challenges for teachers in adapting their teaching to this approach. This paper reports on a study…