Until recently, the challenges inherent in measuring comprehension have impeded our ability to predict the course of language acquisition. The present research reports on a longitudinal assessment of the convergent and predictive validity of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Gestures (CDI: WG; Fenson et al.,…

Data from 492 Italian infants (8-18 months) were collected with the parental questionnaire MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories to describe early actions and gestures (A-G) "vocabulary" and its relation with spoken vocabulary in both comprehension and production. A-G were more strongly correlated with word comprehension…

The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of Socio-Economic Status (SES) on Hebrew-speaking children's developing ability to pluralize nouns and mark adjectives in agreement with them. Participants were 180 gradeschool children from mid-high SES and 180 peers from low SES, in six consecutive grade levels. The task consisted of 32…

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment…

This study examined on-line processing of Swedish sentences in a grammaticality-judgement experiment within the framework of the Competition Model. Three age groups from 6 to 11 and an adult group were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors concerning cue cost were studied: violation position (early vs. late),…

This study describes the language environment of preschool programs serving children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and examines relationships between child characteristics and an automated measure of adult and child language in the classroom. The Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system was used with 40 children with ASD to collect data…

This study examined the joint effects of home environment and center-based child care quality on children's language, communication, and early literacy development, while also considering prior developmental level. Participants were 95 children (46 boys), assessed as toddlers (mean age = 26.33 months; Time 1) and preschoolers (mean age = 68.71…

Poor language skills can have a negative effect on a developing child if not identified early. Current strategies to identify families with children who may need additional support are limited, and may not detect child language problems before they become entrenched. The present study explores observed indices of parental language as a means of…

The goal of this study was to examine the influence of part-word phonotactic probability/neighborhood density on word learning by preschool children with normal vocabularies that varied in size. Ninety-eight children (age 2 ; 11-6 ; 0) were taught consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonwords orthogonally varying in the probability/density of the CV…

Three- and four-year-old children were asked predicate-focus questions ("What's X doing?") about a scene in which an agent performed an action on a patient. We varied: (i) whether (or not) the preceding discourse context, which established the patient as given information, was available for the questioner; and (ii) whether (or not) the patient was…

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from…

Stoel-Gammon (this issue) highlights the close and symbiotic association that exists between the lexical and phonological domains in early linguistic development. Her comprehensive review considers two bodies of literature: (1) child-centred studies; and (2) studies based on adult psycholinguistic research. Within the child-centred studies, both…

Ten mothers were observed prospectively, interacting with their infants aged 0 ; 10 in two contexts (picture description and noun description). Maternal communicative behaviours were coded for volubility, gestural production and labelling style. Verbal labelling events were categorized into three exclusive categories: label only; label plus…

Intensive Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) training courses for Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) can have a positive effect on their use of interaction strategies that support children's communication skills. The impact of brief SLT training courses is not yet clearly understood. The aims of these two studies were to assess the impact of a brief…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…