Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…

Background: The language that children are exposed to in their early years is enhanced by children's picture books. It is important to better characterise this input, and recent research has begun to explore corpora of narrative picture books. However, previous research has been restricted by methodological limitations that make it difficult to…

Children's language development can reflect the developmental process of children's cognition and social emotions. The present study focuses on preschool children's conversational competence and narrative competence, aiming at exploring developmental features of preschool children's pragmatic competence through analyzing data from self-built oral…

The current study investigated whether vocabulary relates to phonetic categorization at neural level in early childhood. Electroencephalogram (EEG) responses were collected from 53 Dutch 20-month-old children in a passive oddball paradigm, in which they were presented with two nonwords "giep" [[voiced velar fricative]ip] and…

Parental input is considered a key predictor of language achievement during the first years of life, yet relatively few studies have assessed its effects on longer-term outcomes. We assess the effects of parental quantity of speech, use of parentese (the acoustically exaggerated, clear, and higher-pitched speech), and turn-taking in infancy, on…

Young children today are exposed to masks on a regular basis. However, there is limited empirical evidence on how masks may affect word learning. The study explored the effect of masks on infants' abilities to fast-map and generalize new words. Seventy-two Chinese infants (43 males, M[subscript age] = 18.26 months) were taught two novel…

We investigate whether child-directed speech (CDS) contains a higher proportion of canonical pronunciations compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), focusing on Korean noun stem-final obstruent variation. In a word-teaching task, we observed that mothers use a higher rate of canonical pronunciation when addressing infants than when addressing…

Word learning studies traditionally examine the narrow link between words and objects, indifferent to the rich contextual information surrounding objects. This research examined whether children attend to this contextual information and construct an associative matrix of the words, objects, people, and environmental context during word learning.…

We present a neural network model of referent identification in a visual world task. Inputs are visual representations of item pairs unfolding with sequences of phonemes identifying the target item. The model is trained to output the semantic representation of the target and to suppress the distractor. The training set uses a 200-word lexicon…

Current understanding of word-finding (WF) difficulties in children and their underlying language processing deficit is poor. Authors have proposed that different underlying deficits may result in different profiles. The current study aimed to better understand WF difficulties by identifying difficult tasks for children with WF difficulties and by…

Variegation - the presence of more than one supraglottal consonant per word - is a key challenge for children as they increase their expressive vocabulary toward the end of the single-word period. Here we consider the prosodic structures of target words and child forms in English, Finnish, French, Japanese and Mandarin to determine whether…

Verb-marking errors are a characteristic feature of the speech of typically-developing (TD) children and are particularly prevalent in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, both the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and the pattern of verb-marking deficit in DLD vary across languages and interact…

An emergent debate surrounds the nature of language processing in bilingual children as an extension of broader questions about their morphosyntactic development in comparison to monolinguals, with the picture so far being nuanced. This paper adds to this debate by investigating the processing of morphosyntactically complex which-questions (e.g.,…

This study investigated whether Korean children follow the acquisition pattern predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and the relationship between caretakers' and children's speech. Accordingly, we analyzed a Korean corpus (Ryu-Corpus) on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), which comprised longitudinal…

German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…