Parents and child care personnel in English-dominant parts of the world often express misgivings about raising children bilingually. Their concerns are based on the belief that dual language learning during the infant-toddler stage confuses children, delays their development, and perhaps even results in reduced language competence. In this…

We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children's online interpretation of…

This study examined information about adjective meanings available in adults' spoken discourse in the original 27 CHILDES corpora of typically developing English-speaking children. In order to increase the probability that adjectives would be novel to children to whom they were addressed, only "rare" adjectives were examined (those that occurred…

Early language development sets the stage for a lifetime of competence in language and literacy. However, the neural mechanisms associated with the relative advantages of early communication success, or the disadvantages of having delayed language development, are not well explored. In this study, 174 elementary school-age children whose parents…

The role of homophony in language change and in child morphological acquisition has often been made recourse to. Regarding the former it has been proposed that the threat of homophony can prevent a sound change from going to completion. With respect to the latter, it has been vaguely and contradictorily claimed that homophonous morphological…

The purpose of this article is to examine the language of girls and boys between 8 and 30 months of age, using the Quebec French version of The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. The findings from this parental report measure confirm those of earlier research, which showed the linguistic superiority of girls over boys at a young age.…

The aim of this study was to examine what four-year-old children repair in their speech. For this purpose, conversational self-repairs (N = 316) made by two typically developing Finnish-speaking children (aged 4 ; 8 and 4 ; 11) were examined. The data comprised eight hours of natural interactions videotaped at the children's homes. The tapes were…

The body awareness of 124 toddlers with mental retardation and of 124 children developing normally matched to them on age and gender was examined. Twenty-nine of the children with mental retardation were diagnosed as Down syndrome (DS). The "Pointing and Naming" Test of Berges and Lezine [Berges, J., & Lezine, I. (1978). "Test d'imitation de…

Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a…

Nineteen shy, twenty-three middle and twenty-five non-shy junior kindergarten children were assessed at school by an unfamiliar examiner, and at home where their parents administered a parallel form of the expressive and receptive vocabulary tests given at school. A speech sample between the child and parent was also collected at home. Shy…

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 focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by…

Studies examining factors that influence when words are learned typically investigate one lexical category or a small set of words. We provide the first evaluation of the relation between input frequency and age of acquisition for a large sample of words. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory provides norming data on age of…

This article is concerned with the proper characterization of subject omission at a particular stage in German child language. It focuses on post-verbal null subjects in finite clauses, here termed Rogues. It is argued that the statistically significant presence of Rogues, in conjunction with their distinct developmental profile, speaks against a…

Speech and language difficulties can be indicative of other cognitive, social and developmental problems. Tools used in the UK have not (1) targeted two-year-old children, (2) included both parents' reports and independent observations, and (3) simultaneously evaluated expression, understanding and speech. This cross-sectional study of two…