Generics ("'Dogs' bark") convey important information about categories and facilitate children's learning. Two studies with parents and their 2- or 4-year-old children (N = 104 dyads) examined whether individual differences in generic language use are as follows: (a) stable over time, contexts, and domains, and (b) linked…

This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

Generic statements, or generics, express generalizations about entire kinds (e.g., ""Girls" are good at a game called "tooki""). In contrast, nongeneric statements express facts about specific (sets of) individuals (e.g., "Jane is good at tooki"). Aside from simply conveying information, generics and nongenerics also instill different causal…

Meisel (hereafter, M) has offered a well-argued and tightly structured piece, discussing in a clear and compelling way a crucial topic in the understanding of language change. I applaud him for both the content and the presentation.

For the 5 million low-income Latino children in the United States who are disproportionately impacted by the numerous risk factors associated with poverty, it is essential to identify proximal protective factors that mitigate these risks and bolster the academic and social skills that are foundational to a successful transition into formal…

The present study examined the relation between language and social ability in a sample of 268 preschoolers aged 18-35 months. Expressive language was assessed with the Italian adaptation of the Language Development Survey (LDS), and Social Competence was assessed with the Questionnaire on Peer Interactions in the Kindergarten (QPI). Results…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

Most evidence concerning cross-linguistic variation in noun bias, the preponderance of nouns in early expressive lexicons (Gentner, 1982), has come from comparisons of monolingual children acquiring different languages. Such designs are susceptible to a number of potential confounders, including group differences in developmental level and…

Purpose: Vocabulary assessment holds promise as a way to identify young bilingual children at risk for language delay. This study compares 2 measures of vocabulary in a group of young Spanish-English bilingual children to a single-language measure used with monolingual children. Method: Total vocabulary and conceptual vocabulary were used to…

The present study investigates whether four- and six-year-old children use pragmatic competence as a criterion for learning from someone else. Specifically, we ask whether children use others' adherence to Gricean maxims to determine whether they will offer valid labels for novel objects. Six-year-olds recognized adherence to the maxims of…

This article addresses the effect of communicative activity on the use of language and gesture by school-age children. The present study examined oral narratives and explanations produced by children aged six and ten years on the basis of several linguistic and gestural measures. Results showed that age affects both gestural and linguistic…

Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11-4 ;…

The linguistic interdependence hypothesis states that the development of skills in a second language (L2) partly depends on the skill level in the first language (L1). It has been suggested that the theory lacked attention for differential interdependence. In this study we test what we call the hypothesis of context-dependent linguistic…

Nouns form the first building blocks of children's language but are not consistently modified by other words until around 2.5 years of age. Before then, children often combine their nouns with gestures that indicate the object labeled by the noun, for example, pointing at a bottle while saying "bottle." These gestures are typically…