Noun-class prefixes are obligatory in most Bantu languages. However, the Sotho languages (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi) permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of "unmarked" phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Using…

The study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9-3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns--the number of syllables and stress patterns--is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and…

This article is the text of a keynote address given to the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation at its annual conference in Chicago in February 2009. Three examples of children's linguistic and literary playfulness are examined, two from England and one from the USA. The article explores the radical implications of these examples for primary…

Six tests of the spontaneous speech of twenty-one English-speaking children (1 ; 10 to 2 ; 8; MLUs 1[middle dot]53 to 4[middle dot]38) demonstrate the presence of the syntactic category determiner from the start of combinatorial speech, supporting nativist accounts. Children use multiple determiners before a noun to the same extent as their…

Researchers have long been puzzled by children's variable omission of grammatical morphemes, often attributing this to a lack of semantic or syntactic competence. Recent studies suggest that some of this variability may be due to phonological constraints. This paper explored this issue further by conducting a longitudinal study of five…

The present study investigated phonological whole-word measures and consonant accuracy in bilingual and monolingual children to investigate how target approximations drive phonological acquisition. The study included eight bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking 3-year-olds and their monolingual peers (eight Spanish and eight American English).…

The influence of phonological (i.e. individual sounds), lexical (i.e. whole-word forms) and semantic (i.e. meaning) characteristics on the words known by infants age 1;4 to 2;6 was examined, using an existing database (Dale & Fenson, 1996). For each noun, word frequency, two phonological (i.e. positional segment average, biphone average), two…

The present study determined whether parenting style, defined by control strategies varying in power-assertion mediated the established relation between maternal language usage (grammar and semantics) and child language (grammar, semantics and pragmatics) during toddlerhood (n = 60). Based upon their use of control strategies mothers were…

Effective early language and literacy instruction to remediate language deficits and to prevent problems in learning to read is an important area for intervention research. Children with early language deficits who are growing up in poverty are dually at risk. Early deficits in language development predict both continued delays in language…

Spanish is being lost at an alarming rate in the United States, for most immigrant families within two to three generations of arrival. Previous research indicates that the third generation of Hispanic immigrants typically becomes English monolingual (Veltman 2000; Appel & Muysken 1987; Fishman 1978). This investigation examines the role…

Why does the city of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy feature one of the best public systems of early education in the world? This book documents the comprehensive and innovative approach that utilizes the "hundred languages of children" to support their well-being and foster their intellectual development. Reggio Emilia is a fast-growing…

This article presents the authors' comments on Nina Hyams' article, "The Acquisition of Inflection: A Parameter Setting Approach" (AIPSA). The article began as a 1986 presentation at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). Parts of it were also presented at the 4th Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL) in 1987…

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal "-s" until five- six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal "-s" as young as 1;4. These apparently conflicting findings can…

Delays in the onset of canonical babbling with hearing loss are extensively documented. Relatively little is known about other aspects of prelinguistic vocal development and hearing loss. Eight infants with typical hearing and eight with severe-to-profound hearing loss were matched with regard to a significant vocal development milestone, the…

Language serves as a mental tool set for self-regulation, allowing us to reflect on and modify our own behavior. Children as young as 3 years talk out loud to themselves to regulate their behavior, using self-regulatory self-talk. Can preverbal children use infant signs as self-talk for the purpose of self-regulation? The author shares…