Spontaneous language samples are a useful tool in studying the nature of morphosyntactic production in both clinical and academic settings. However, little work has been done on typical frequency of occurrence of morpheme production and even less on the degree of temporal reliability of morpheme frequency between samples. This study compares two…

Neighbourhood Density (ND) and Phonotactic Probability (PP) influence word learning in children. This influence appears to change over development but the separate developmental trajectories of influence of PP and ND on word learning have not previously been mapped. This study examined the cross-sectional developmental trajectories of influence of…

This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0 ; 8 and 3 ; 0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data…

In my dissertation, I examine four notation systems used to represent hand configurations in child acquisition of signed languages. Linguists have long recognized the descriptive limitations of Stokoe notation, currently the most commonly used system for phonetic or phonological transcription, but continue using it because of its widespread…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate whether children with receptive-expressive language delay (R/ELD) and expressive-only language delay (ELD) differ in their use of gesture; to examine relationships between their use of gesture, symbolic comprehension, and language; to consider implications for assessment and for the nature of…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of age and family socioeconomic status (SES) on the evaluative language performance of Mandarin-Chinese-speaking young children and their mothers. The participants were 65 mother-child dyads recruited in Taiwan. Thirty-four of these dyads were from middle-class families and 31 were from…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm…

This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical…

The goals of the current study were (a) to assess differences in child and adult pausing and (b) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from 10 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of…

We delineated the achievement of early speech-language milestones in 15 young children with Rett syndrome ("MECP2" positive) in the first two years of life using retrospective video analysis. By contrast to the commonly accepted concept that these children are normal in the pre-regression period, we found markedly atypical development of…

Research on immediate effects of background television during mother-infant toy play shows that an operating television in the room disrupts maternal communicative behaviors crucial for infants' vocabulary acquisition. This study is the first to examine associations between frequent background TV/video exposure during mother-infant toy play at…

The present study investigated the role of early stimulation in the home and child language delays in the emergence of depressive symptoms. Data were from a longitudinal study of at-risk children in Hawaii (n = 587). Low learning stimulation in the home at age 3 and language delays in first grade both significantly increased risk for child…