Children with SLI have difficulty with tense and agreement morphology. This study examined the proficiency of these children and their typically developing peers with the coordination of tense and aspect markers in two-clause sentences. Scenarios designed to elicit past tense were presented to five- to eight-year-old children with SLI (n = 14) and…

We studied spontaneous speech noun-phrase production in eight French-speaking children with SLI (aged 5;0 to 5; 1) and controls matched on age (4;10 to 5;11) or MLU (aged 3;2 to 4;1). Results showed that children with SLI prefer simple DP structures to complex ones while producing more substitution and omission errors than controls. The three…

Two recent proposals link the use of nonagreeing "don't" to the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage. Guasti & Rizzi (2002) argue for a misset parameter involving how agreement is spelled out. Schütze (2010) proposes that Infl is underspecified in child language and that "do" surfaces to support the contracted clitic/affix…

Fathers' vocabulary to infants has been linked in the literature to early child language development, however, little is known about the variability in fathers' language behavior. This study considered associations between fathers' work characteristics and fathers' vocabulary among a sample of employed African American fathers of 6-month-old…

Intonational development has been an area of interest during the past four decades, from the perspectives of both production and perception. But relatively few conclusions have been made about how children acquire the intonational component of their grammar. To date, prior studies of intonational development have not included a fine-grained…

This study reports on an investigation into adult and child interactions observed in the outdoor play environment in four Local Authority early years foundation stage settings in England. In this instance the common two features across the settings were the presence of tricycles and a timetabled outdoor play period. In total, across the four…

English-speaking children understand and produce generic expressions in the preschool years, but there are cross-linguistic differences in how generics are expressed. Three studies examined interpretation of generic noun phrases in three- to seven-year-old child (N=192) and adult speakers (N=163) of Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to suggestions by…

In French, the acquisition of object clitics seems delayed, and omissions are documented. In this article, we look at the experimental paradigm traditionally used to elicit object clitics and propose a new elicitation procedure that is closer to how clitics are produced in spontaneous production. We show that under the proposed new experiment, the…

Adults often use simple words instead of complex words when talking to young children. Reasons vary from teachers' beliefs that young children cannot understand sophisticated vocabulary because they are too young or have limited language skills, to teachers' unfamiliarity with complex words or with strategies for supporting vocabulary. As a…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

The purpose of this manuscript was to describe a community-based program, Language and Play Everyday (LAPE), aimed at evaluating effective practices for enhancing parents' capacity to increase their toddlers' communication skills. LAPE was a parent education program focused on coaching parents to embed naturalistic language-enhancing…

Research Findings: To extend findings that are mainly based on North American studies with English speakers, we studied 989 Chilean mothers from households of low socioeconomic status and their prekindergarten children, posing 2 questions: (a) Do mothers' self-reported practices about literacy development predict early literacy outcomes over and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors explored whether French-learning infants use nonadjacent phonotactic regularities in their native language, which they learn between the ages of 7 and 10 months, to segment words from fluent speech. Method: Two groups of 20 French-learning infants were tested using the head-turn preference procedure at 10 and 13…

Researchers have suggested that as children's language skill develops in early childhood, it comes to help children regulate their emotions (Cole, Armstrong, & Pemberton, 2010; Kopp, 1989), but the pathways by which this occurs have not been studied empirically. In a longitudinal study of 120 children from 18 to 48 months of age, associations…

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…