Notes that regardless of the language, children acquire language on the same general schedule and the same cognitive path. Explores the process of child language acquisition, from sounds, through word meanings, to syntax and grammar. (HTH)

Assessed representational abilities in hearing and deaf 2-year-old children of hearing and deaf mothers. Found group differences in expressive and receptive language based on maternal report and on experimenter assessment, but no differences emerged in child solitary symbolic play or in child- or mother-initiated child collaborative symbolic play.…

Investigated Icelandic and Norwegian children's knowledge of the past tense of verbs. Researchers systematically manipulated verb characteristics (type frequency, token frequency, and phonological coherence). These factors played an important role in the acquisition of the two languages. The predominant source of errors in children shifted during…

Examined young children's production of evaluative explanations in narratives of a story presented as a video sequence with no spoken dialogue. Examination of children in four age groups indicated that prompts greatly facilitated children's production of evaluatives and that they could adopt a global perspective on the story when formulating…

Examines whether bilingual children can differentiate their languages with respect to the ability to form compound nouns and to test the validity of previous explanations of the acquisition of compounds. Focused on whether a bilingual French-English child could differentiate between two compounding rules for nouns in the two languages. (Author/VWL)

A focus was made on puzzling children with the help of few examples, the times when they said unexpected or surprising things or made remarks that shouldn't have been made. The way these children present their meaning in different cases and the resources they draw upon for thinking and for expression is explored.

This article reviews the nature and function of recasts, a well-documented way of responding to young children. The paper challenges the definition of recast and argues that it is too broad a category to be useful, either for theories of language development or for practice. In particular, various forms of recast have featured in intervention…

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2-12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of…

This is a study of the lexical and grammatical abilities of 16 lexically precocious talkers. These children, aged 2;0 were compared to their age-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;0, and their expressive vocabulary-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;6. Individual differences in children's lexical knowledge at 2;0 were stable -- evident…

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home…

Objectives: To determine whether oral language, working memory, and social anxiety differentiate children with selective mutism (SM), children with anxiety disorders (ANX), and normal controls (NCs) and explore predictors of mutism severity. Method: Children ages 6 to 10 years with SM (n = 44) were compared with children with ANX (n = 28) and NCs…

Two experiments are described which explore the relationship between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabularies at 1 ; 6 () or 1 ; 3, 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 9 () and the comprehension infants demonstrated in a preferential looking task. The instrument used was the Oxford CDI, a British English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Words &…

This article focuses on the meaning of nonfinite clauses ("root infinitives") in Dutch and English child language. I present experimental and naturalistic data confirming the claim that Dutch root infinitives are more often modal than English root infinitives. This cross-linguistic difference is significantly smaller than previously assumed,…

The study to be reported in this paper examined the work accomplished by "mm" and "mm hm" in the interactions of a parent and his daughter aged 0;10-2;0. Using the findings of Gardner (2001) for adults, the analysis shows that "mm" accomplished a range of functions based on its sequential placement and prosodic features, whereas "mm hm" was much…

Background: Studies have suggested that nonmaternal care (NMC) may either carry risks or be beneficial for children's language development. However, few tested the possibility that NMC may be more or less protective for children with different family backgrounds. This study investigates the role of the family environment, as reflected in the…