Background: Numerous studies show clear evidence that children display typicality effects during early word learning. However, little is known of the typicality of stimuli used by standardized language tests to assess children's language development. Aims: To examine the typicality of stimuli used by the Reynell Developmental Language Scales--III…

Purpose: Developmental social-pragmatic and naturalistic behavioral interventions share a number of features, but they differ in their use of facilitative strategies and direct elicitation of child language. In this study, the authors investigated whether these approaches produce different language and social outcomes in young children with…

The stability of language across childhood is traditionally assessed by exploring longitudinal relations between individual language measures. However, language encompasses many domains and varies with different sources (child speech, parental report, experimenter assessment). This study evaluated individual variation in multiple age-appropriate…

The present study investigated the effect of professional development (PD) on preschool teachers' conversational responsivity in the classroom, defined as teachers' use of strategies to promote children's participation in extended conversational exchanges (communication-facilitating strategies) and exposure to advanced linguistic models…

Pronouns seem to be acquired in an asymmetrical way, where children confuse the meaning of pronouns with reflexives up to the age of six, but not vice versa. Children's production of the same referential expressions is appropriate at the age of four. However, response-based tasks, the usual means to investigate child language comprehension, are…

Using the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, language comprehension and production were compared in a sample of 101,250 children aged 2 ; 00 to 9 ; 11 and a focus subsample of 38,845 children aged 2 ; 00 to 4 ; 11 from sixteen under-researched developing nations. In the whole sample, comprehension slightly exceeded production; correlations between…

The extant literature includes conflicting assertions regarding the influence of bilingualism on the rate of language development. The present study compared the language development of equivalently high-SES samples of bilingually and monolingually developing children from 1 ; 10 to 2 ; 6. The monolingually developing children were significantly…

This investigation focuses on the development of intonation patterns in four Catalan-speaking children and two Spanish-speaking children between 0 ; 11 and 2 ; 4. Pitch contours were prosodically analyzed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework in all meaningful utterances, for a total of 6558 utterances. The pragmatic meaning and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors used cued shadowing to examine children's phonological word-form representations by studying the effects of onset and rhyme primes on lexical access. Method: Twenty-five preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI; hereafter known as the SLI group), 24 age- and gender-matched children (AM group), and 20…

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction…

This dissertation tests a new account of rapid word learning and vocabulary growth that these processes develop as the result of attentional biases to the features of a category that are relevant to labeling/categorization, built as the result of word-learning experience within each category. Study 1 demonstrated that children's vocabulary size…

Mean length of utterance (MLU) is a frequently used measure of the expressive language of young children. The suggested conventional, contemporary, clinical practice is to calculate it from a language sample of a minimum of 50 to 100 contiguous intelligible utterances. This practice places considerable strain on professionals working with young…

This study investigates the acquisition of word-initial Korean obstruents (i.e. stops, affricates and fricatives). Korean obstruents are characterized by a three-way contrast among stops and affricates (i.e. fortis, aspirated and lenis) and a two-way fricative contrast (i.e. fortis and lenis). All these obstruents are voiceless word-initially.…

Psycholinguistics coined the term idiomorph to describe idiosyncratic invented word-like units that toddlers use to refer to familiar objects during their early language development (Haslett & Samter, 1997; Otto, 2008; Reich, 1986; Scovel, 2004; Werner & Kaplan, 1963). Idiomorphs act as "words" because their meanings and phonetic pronunciations…

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6-4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children…