This study examined the acquisition of numeral classifiers in 120 monolingual Japanese children. Previous research has argued that the complex semantic system underlying classifiers is late acquired. Thus, we set out to determine the age at which Japanese children are able to extend the semantic properties of classifiers to novel items/situations.…

Based on findings from a variety of research, Shin and Miller (2022) propose a 4-step process that children go through as they learn sociolinguistic variation. Their proposal raises many interesting questions that should inspire future research. Here, I discuss their Step 1 -- the stage in which, according to their proposal, children produce only…

Infants experience language in rich multisensory environments. For example, they may first be exposed to the word applesauce while touching, tasting, smelling, and seeing applesauce. In three experiments using different methods we asked whether the number of distinct senses linked with the semantic features of objects would impact word recognition…

In standard models of language production or comprehension, the elements which are retrieved from memory and combined into a syntactic structure are "lemmas" or "lexical items". Such models implicitly take a "lexicalist" approach, which assumes that lexical items store meaning, syntax, and form together, that…

Statistical learning (SL), the ability to detect and extract regularities from inputs, is considered a domain-general building block for typical language development. We compared 55 verbal children with autism (ASD, 6-12 years) and 50 typically-developing children in four SL tasks. The ASD group exhibited reduced learning in the linguistic SL…

Speech exhibits quasi-rhythmic regularities at multiple timescales, which seem to be crucial to comprehension. Both children's ability to extract rhythm from complex stimuli and to produce rhythmic patterns are known to undergo changes from infancy to adulthood. However, it remains unclear what rhythm skills specifically related to speech look…

Demonstrative words are one of the most important ways of establishing reference in conversation. This work describes Spanish-speaking children's demonstrative production between ages 2 to 10 using data from the CHILDES corpora. Results indicate that children feature all demonstratives in their lexicon -- however, the distal term is scarce…

Questions about early word knowledge pervade the literature on both typical and atypical language trajectories. To determine which words an infant knows, researchers have relied on two types of measures--caregiver-report and eye-gaze behavior. When these measures are compared, however, their results frequently fail to converge, making it difficult…

Most deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are born to hearing parents and steered toward spoken rather than signed language, introducing a delay in language access. This study investigated the effects of this delay on number acquisition. DHH children (N = 44, mean[subscript age] = 58 months, 21F, >50% White) and typically-hearing (TH)…

In this Methods Showcase Article, we illustrate mixed-effects modeling with a multinomial dependent variable as a means of explaining complexities in language. We model data on future-time reference in second language Spanish, which consists of a nominal dependent variable that has three levels, measured over 73 participants. We offer step-by-step…

Executive functions (EFs) emerge in the first years of life and are essential for many areas of child development. However, intraindividual developmental trajectories of EF during toddlerhood and their associations with ongoing development of language skills remain poorly understood. The present three-wave study examined these trajectories and…

Introduction: One of the fundamental abilities underlying language development is phonological working memory. In this regard, the hypothesis is that children with specific language impairments have difficulties with phonological working memory, which may limit their language development. Objective: The aim of this study is to examine phonological…

Both naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs) and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) have been shown to support the language development of children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder and minimal speech. However, little research has addressed the impact of incorporating AAC systems within NDBIs. This…

Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic…

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists tailor language sample elicitation methods to the goals of the assessment and the needs of each child. In school-age children, narrative retell and expository contexts elicit more complex language than conversational contexts. However, the impact of elicitation context on younger children has been less…