Evidentials are grammatical elements such as affixes and particles indicating the source of knowledge. We provide an overview of this grammatical category and consider three research domains to which developmental studies on evidentiality contribute: the acquisition of linguistic means to characterize knowledge, the conceptual understanding of…

The ability to distinguish between an inflectional derivation of a target word, which is a variant of the target, and a completely new word is an important task of language acquisition. In an attempt to explain the ability to solve this problem, it has been proposed that the beginning of the word is its most psychologically salient portion.…

The emergence of grammar in relation to lexical growth was analyzed in a sample of Finnish children (N=181) at 2 ; 0. The Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory was used to gather information on both language domains. The onset of grammar occurred in close association with vocabulary growth. The acquisition of the nominal and…

Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel…

This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3;5 to 8;5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic…

Using fMRI, we explored the relationship between phonological awareness (PA), a measure of metaphonological knowledge of the segmental structure of speech, and brain activation patterns during processing of print and speech in young readers from 6 to 10 years of age. Behavioral measures of PA were positively correlated with activation levels for…

In the 1980s, researchers in child language devised several new experimental techniques to assess children's emerging linguistic competence. Innovations in methodology were needed to bridge the apparent gap between the expectation of rapid language acquisition, based on linguistic theory, and the protracted acquisition that was being witnessed…

In this commentary, differences between feature re-assembly and feature selection are discussed. Lardiere's proposals are compared to existing approaches to grammatical features in second language (L2) acquisition. Questions are raised about the predictive power of the feature re-assembly approach. (Contains 1 footnote.)

This dissertation investigates the relation between prosodic events at the phrasal level and component events at the rhythmic level. The overarching hypothesis is that the interaction among component rhythmic events gives rise to prosodic patterns at the phrasal level, while at the same time being constrained by the latter, and that in the case of…

Previous investigators have found significant relations between children's early spontaneous gesture and their subsequent vocabulary development: the more gesture children produce early, the larger their later vocabularies. The questions we address here are (1) whether we can increase children's gesturing through experimental manipulation and, if…

Many children find school tests difficult, but children who are deaf or hard of hearing may find them especially so. Reports from the 2008 Test Equity Summit indicate that disproportionate numbers of students who are deaf or hard of hearing at all grade levels are failing critically important tests even though their classroom work may show that…

Background: The metalinguistic ability to cope with homonyms, that is, words having multiple unrelated meanings, emerges rather late in the course child language development. It is associated with specific neural activity and related to academic achievement and second language learning. This study is about homonyms that are at the same time…

Infant-parent play with toys is an early form of social communication, and the toy features (i.e., affordances), as well as the child's language competence, contribute to the developmental level of the play and the types of play actions that occur. This research, conducted in cooperation with a toy manufacturer, investigated how the affordances of…

This article investigated the relationship between age at onset of canonical babbling and audibility of amplified speech in children with hearing impairment. Thirteen children with severe-profound hearing impairment and two children with normal hearing participated in a longitudinal investigation of vocalization development. A nonconcurrent…