The purpose of my study was to evaluate the relationship between classroom process quality and child language and academic outcomes from the beginning of the pre-kindergarten year to the beginning of the kindergarten year for one cohort of children participating in a state-funded pre-kindergarten program in South Carolina. Data for my study were…

Parent-child conversations are a potential source of children's developing understanding of the biological domain. We investigated patterns in parent-child conversations that may inform children about biological domain boundaries. At a marine science center exhibit, we compared parent-child talk about typical sea animals with faces (fish) with…

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the…

The mothers of 29 Spanish English bilingual 25-month-olds kept diary records of their children's dual language exposure and provided information on their children's English and Spanish language development using the MacArthur-Bates inventories. Relative amount of exposure predicted language outcomes in English and Spanish. In addition, the number…

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

We compare learning of two inflection types--obligatory noun plurals and optional noun possessives. We tested 107 Hebrew-speaking children aged 6-7 on the same tasks at the beginning and end of first grade. Performance on both constructions improved during this short period, but plurals scored higher from the start, with improvement only in…

This dissertation investigates clitic doubling of both dative and accusative objects in adult and child language. It reports on three experimental studies designed to discover the specific distributional properties of this phenomenon, with particular attention to the effect of "rheme" and "kontrast," two distinct concepts often collapsed as…

Most young children begin developing language skills at a rapid pace, early in their lives. Children with Down syndrome, the most common known genetic cause of intellectual disability, typically experience delays in language development that persist as they grow older. Parents and teachers can naturally reinforce the language skills of a child…

This paper investigated children's ability to use syntactic structures to infer semantic information. The particular syntax-semantics link examined was the one between transitivity (transitive/intransitive structures) and telicity (telic/atelic perspectives; that is, boundedness). Although transitivity is an important syntactic reflex of telicity,…

Upon witnessing a causal event, do children's gestures encode causal knowledge that (a) does not appear in their linguistic descriptions or (b) conveys the same information as their sentential expressions? The former use of gesture is considered supplementary; the latter is considered reinforcing. Sixty-four English-speaking children aged 2.5-5…

The study compared the vocal production and language learning environments of 26 young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to 78 typically developing children using measures derived from automated vocal analysis. A digital language processor and audio-processing algorithms measured the amount of adult words to children and the amount of…

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which…

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of…

Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database…

We investigated whether access to a sign language affects the development of pragmatic competence in three groups of deaf children aged 6 to 11 years: native signers from deaf families receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction, native signers from deaf families receiving oralist instruction and late signers from hearing families receiving oralist…