We investigated 16- and 20-month-olds' flexibility in mapping phonotactically illegal words to objects. Using an associative word-learning task, infants were presented with a training phase that either highlighted or did not highlight the referential status of a novel label. Infants were then habituated to two novel objects, each paired with a…

This report is a summary document which explains the rationale for the CECIL (Coaching Early Conversations Interaction and Language) project, delivery within the context of COVID-19, the findings, the learnings, and next steps. The Institute for Employment Studies (IES) led an Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE), and the University of…

Background and aims: High quality student-teacher relationships (STR) are important for children's academic and social development. We explore how individual child language domains (semantics, syntax, pragmatics), teacher years of experience, and classroom placement (general or special education) relate to STR quality for children with autism…

The present study investigated Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the polarity sensitive item "renhe'"'any" in Mandarin Chinese. Like its English counterpart "any," "renhe" can be used as a negative polarity item (NPI), or as a free choice (FC) item, and both the distribution and…

This study examines whether lexical repetition, syntactic skills, and working memory (WM) affect children's syntactic-priming behavior, i.e. their tendency to adopt previously encountered syntactic structures. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children were primed with prenominal (e.g. "the yellow…

We tested four predictions based on the assumption that optional infinitives can be attributed to properties of the input whereby children inappropriately extract non-finite subject-verb sequences (e.g. "the girl run") from larger input utterances (e.g. "Does the girl run?" "Let's watch the girl run"). Thirty children…

Within the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1-1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not…

The metalingual (also called "metalinguistic") function of language is a well-discussed concept in the literature of functional linguistics. It is often conceived as a purpose in which language is used to define or talk about language itself. Similarly, the purpose in which language is used for teaching in general is explained as the…

The purpose of this ethnographic case study was to study the language development of 4-year-old emergent bilinguals in a bilingual (Spanish/English) Head Start classroom with flexible language practices. Data were collected throughout the 10-month school year by visiting the classroom 2-3 times per week. Data include: field notes (observations and…

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice…

This paper reviews and synthesizes research into the ways in which parents support their child across three major developmental domains in early childhood: early language, play and early literacy. We show how these domains are linked to each other and suggest that there is some evidence that interventions in all of them will promote mutual…

This study examined whether children's speech and literacy skills were impacted by co-working among student speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and student teachers during an inter-professional education (IPE) initiative. Seven five-year-old children who demonstrated difficulties with speech and/or phonological awareness participated in three…

We examined the effects of object attributes on children's descriptive patterns in a referential communication task. Thirty preschoolers described object pairs that were selected by the experimenter. The targets were defined by shared size or colour, and differed on the non-target dimension in half of the trials. The children also completed a…

Early spontaneous gesture, specifically deictic gesture, predicts subsequent vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. Here, we ask whether deictic gesture plays a similar role in predicting later vocabulary size in children with Down Syndrome (DS), who have been shown to have difficulties in speech production, but strengths in…