Systematic longitudinal observations were made as typically developing toddlers and young children with autism and with Down syndrome interacted with their caregivers in order to document how joint engagement developed over a year-long period and how variations in joint engagement experiences predicted language outcome. Children with autism…

Previous studies have found that proficiency in a second language affects how the meanings of words are accessed. Support for this hypothesis is based on data from explicit memory tasks with bilingual participants who know two languages that are relatively similar phonologically and orthographically (e.g., Dutch-English, French-English). The…

Previous research has shown that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn two words that only differ by one of their consonants, but fail to do so when the words differ only by one of their vowels. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels in lexical…

In this paper, I explore different ways of picturing language learning in philosophy, all of them inspired by Wittgenstein and all of them concerned about scepticism of meaning. I start by outlining the two pictures of children and language learning that emerge from Kripke's famous reading of Wittgenstein. Next, I explore how social-pragmatic…

Purpose: To introduce a Clinical Forum focused on the Complexity Account of Treatment Efficacy (C. K. Thompson, L. P. Shapiro, S. Kiran, & J. Sobecks, 2003), a counterintuitive but effective approach for treating language disorders. This approach espouses training "complex" structures to promote generalized improvement of simpler, linguistically…

Toddlers 15 and 18 months of age were exposed to audiovisual recordings of two novel words paired with novel toys. The words were presented in familiar sentence frames or in isolation. Linguistic context had a greater effect on younger than on older infants. Specifically, 15-month-old boys exhibited successful learning only in the context of…

Deviation of real speech from grammatical ideals due to disfluency and other speech errors presents potentially serious problems for the language learner. While infants may initially benefit from attending primarily or solely to infant-directed speech, which contains few grammatical errors, older infants may listen more to adult-directed speech.…

Culture and vocabulary are widely accepted as important elements for language courses, and pictures (photographs, slides, drawings, pictures from magazines, etc.) have long been a favorite tool of language teachers at all levels. Although pictures provide an excellent means of integrating culture with vocabulary acquisition, their use is not only…

Previous research has examined children's ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1 ; 9 to 2 ; 10 (N=34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In, children added "-ed" and "-ing" to novel stems, and dropped them from novel…

This paper presents evidence from a French-English bilingual child between the ages of two years three months and three years five months, growing up bilingually from birth, with a French mother and English father in an English speaking environment. In focussing upon questions in the child's two languages, and charting in some detail the emergence…

A review of Psycholinguistics: Selected Papers by Roger Brown (New York: Free Press, 1970) by Roger Brown. (DB)

The Stroop color-word task cannot be administered to children who are unable to read. However, our color-object Stroop task can. One hundred and sixty-eight children of 31/2-61/2 years (50% female; 24 children at each 6-month interval) were shown line drawings of familiar objects in a color that was congruent (e.g., an orange carrot), incongruent…

"Grammar is the sound, structure, and meaning system of language. All languages have grammar, and each language has its own grammar" (Beverly, 2007, p.1). People who speak the same language are able to communicate with each other because they all know the grammar system and structure of that language, that is, the meaningful rules of…

Personalization of learning and instruction is the most critical issue facing contemporary education--not state testing or vouchers or even aging schools. Personalization is an attempt on the part of a school to take into account individual student characteristics and needs and flexible instructional practices in organizing the learning…

Computational models have played a central role in the debate over language learnability. This article discusses how they have been used in different "stances", from generative views to more recently introduced explanatory frameworks based on embodiment, cognitive development and cultural evolution. By digging into the details of certain specific…