This study reports on language outcomes at eight years from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized controlled study of foster care. We previously have shown that children placed in foster care by age two have substantially stronger preschool language outcomes than children placed later and children remaining in institutional care.…

Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at…

Acquiring useful language by age 5 has been identified as a strong predictor of positive outcomes in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This study examined the relationship between age of language acquisition and later functioning in children with ASD (n = 119). First word acquisition at a range of ages was probed for its…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…

This research study set out to explore the education practitioner's role in promoting communication development in early years classrooms. The study was undertaken in the combined nursery and reception early years unit of a small primary school using an ethnographic approach. Qualitative data was collected through 18 three-hour visits to the…

This longitudinal study involving 101 Dutch four- and five-year-olds charts indirect request (IR) and mental state term (MST) understanding and investigates the role that Theory of Mind (ToM) and general linguistic ability (vocabulary, syntax, and spatial language) play in this development. The results showed basic understanding of IR and MST in…

Canonical babbling is a critical milestone for speech development and is usually well in place by 10 months. The possibility that infants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show late onset of canonical babbling has so far eluded evaluation. Rate of vocalization or "volubility" has also been suggested as possibly aberrant in infants with…

Learning word-referent mappings is complex because the word and its referent tend to co-occur with multiple other words and potential referents. Such complexity has led to proposals for a host of constraints on learning, though how these constraints may interact has not yet been investigated in detail. In this paper, we investigated interactions…

In natural languages, the mapping from surface form to meaning is often quite complex, and hence the acquisition of the phenomena at the boundary between syntax and semantics has been one of the central issues in current acquisition research. This study addresses the issue of whether children have adult-like knowledge of LF "wh"-movement and its…

We studied the gestures used by children with classic Rett syndrome (RTT) to provide evidence as to how this essential aspect of communicative functions develops. Seven participants with RTT were longitudinally observed between 9 and 18 months of life. The gestures used by these participants were transcribed and coded from a retrospective analysis…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

The purpose of this addendum is to include within our discussion the findings of Girolametto et al. (2007), a randomized controlled trial of Teacher Talk training, an adapted version of Learning Language and Loving It (LLLI) (Weitzman and Greenberg, 2002). Teacher Talk does not include the coaching and video feedback elements of LLLI. Girolametto…

This study explores the widely documented difficulty children have with object clitics in the acquisition of Romance languages. It reports on two experiments: a production task and a comprehension task. Results from the elicitation task confirm that object omission occurs at nonnegligible rates in 2- and 3-year-olds. Findings from the…

Faroese is at the tail end of a change from an Icelandic-type syntax in which V-to-T is obligatory to a Danish-type system in which this movement is impossible. While the older word order is very rarely produced by adult Faroese speakers, there is evidence that this order is still marginally present in the adult grammar and thus only dispreferred,…

Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…