This report describes three extensions to a classification system for paediatric speech sound disorders termed the Speech Disorders Classification System (SDCS). Part I describes a classification extension to the SDCS to differentiate motor speech disorders from speech delay and to differentiate among three sub-types of motor speech disorders.…

In a bilingual context, the mother tongue plays a key role in a child's social and personal development, in education and in second-language learning. There is a complex relationship between these three areas. Support for children receiving education through a second language is often in the form of additional learning opportunities in the second…

This study utilized a large sample of two-parent families from low-income rural communities to examine the contributions of father education and vocabulary, during picture book interactions with their infants at 6 months of age, to children's subsequent communication development at 15 months and expressive language development at 36 months. After…

Two-year-old children often start asking questions with "where." In this study we test whether children understand "where" to mean route or absolute location and whether the size of the space or elevation made a difference. Previous research has documented developmental changes over the preschool years in children's non-verbal spatial reasoning.…

Repetition is used for a range of functions in conversation. In this study, we examined all the repetitions used in spontaneous conversations by 41 French adult-child dyads, with children aged 2 ; 3 and 3 ; 6, to test the hypotheses that adults repeat to establish that they have understood, and that children repeat to ratify what adults have said.…

This study investigates when and how French-learning children acquire the main grammatical constraint on the noun category, i.e. the obligatory use of a preceding determiner. Spontaneous speech samples coming from the corpora of twenty children in each of three age groups, 1 ; 8, 2 ; 6, 3 ; 3, were transcribed and coded with respect to…

Children with word finding difficulties (CwWFDs) are slower and less accurate at naming monomorphemic words than typically developing children (Dockrell, Messer & George, 2001), but their difficulty in naming morphologically complex words has not yet been investigated. One aim of this paper was to identify whether CwWFDs are similar to typically…

Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in discourse, which casts doubt concerning child learners' use of syntax in verb learning. This study investigated whether Mandarin learning children would nonetheless extend verb meanings based on the number of NPs in sentences. Forty-one Mandarin-speaking two- and three-year-olds…

This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish-English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual…

Evidentials are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers. In Bulgarian they provide information about authorship--whether the speaker has personally acquired the information or not--and modality--whether perceptual or cognitive mechanisms were involved in the information's generation. In two experiments, Bulgarian kindergarteners and third-graders…

Two groups of children were given pictures of animals to name as quickly as they could. The groups comprised 40 nursery aged children (mean age 3 ; 11) and 40 Year 2 children (mean age 6 ; 9) attending primary school in London. The 30 animals were presented one by one, on cards, and any errors made by the children were noted. Consistent with a…

The quality of the verbal environment sets the stage for young children's developing perceptions of themselves and others. This document provides hands-on, practical advice for practitioners to support children's self-perception and coping skills by establishing and maintaining a positive verbal environment. Positive verbal environments enhance…

Two studies used a new paradigm to examine preschool children's (i.e., 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) word learning across multiple sense modalities. In Study 1 (n = 60), children heard a word for an object that they touched but did not see, while word learning was examined using objects that were seen but not touched. In Study 2 (n = 60), children…

Word-level reading and spelling skills support reading comprehension and writing composition. Accurate and fluent word-level reading and spelling are facilitated when individuals have clear mental orthographic representations (MOR) that permit them to quickly recognize and recall the visual representation of a word, freeing up memory and…

The communication skills of typically developing Finnish-speaking children between three and six years of age were examined using the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC). The differences between the boys and girls were also investigated. Results showed that the performance of the three-year-old children differed on the Speech subscale of the…