From an early age, children show a tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds of objects. Accounts of this tendency have not addressed whether children develop a metacognitive representation of what they are doing. In 3 experiments (each N = 48), preschoolers received a test of the "metacognitive disambiguation…

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults' perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children's musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether…

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual…

Research Findings: The present study investigated the social and cognitive precursors of vocabulary knowledge in 239 Turkish preschoolers both concurrently (Time 1 [T1] Mage = 53.29 months, SD = 10.19) and subsequently 1 year later (Time 2 [T2] Mage = 65.40 months, SD = 10.55). We examined the role of parenting behaviors by focusing on emotional…

This study examines the English vocabulary development of 43 very young child English as a foreign language (FL) learners (age 3.2-6.2) in China. They were tested twice for vocabulary breadth (reception and production) and semantic depth (paradigmatic and syntagmatic vocabulary knowledge). The development of the English vocabulary knowledge…

The authors explored predictions from basic emotion theory (BET) that facial emotion expression recognition skills are insular with respect to their own development, and yet foundational to the development of emotional perspective-taking skills. Participants included 417 preschool children for whom estimates of these 2 emotion understanding…

Purpose: Random item generation (RIG) involves central executive functioning. Measuring aspects of random sequences can therefore provide a simple method to complement other tools for cognitive assessment. We examine the extent to which RIG relates to specific measures of cognitive function, and whether those measures can be estimated using RIG…

This study examines the role of a particular kind of linguistic input--talk about the past and future, pretend, and explanations, that is, talk that is decontextualized--in the development of vocabulary, syntax, and narrative skill in typically developing (TD) children and children with pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI). Decontextualized talk…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among oral language, decoding, and reading comprehension for children with autism. Participants included 13 English-speaking children with a diagnosis of high-functioning autism (IQ > 70) who were included in a typical classroom, and who had parents who spoke English. Parts of the…

This article documents differences in cognitive development, as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of early childhood in four developing countries. A large number of potential mediators, such as urban residence, preschool…

The main goal of this article is to discuss a new concept, the "Compensation Age Theory (CAT)", for individuals with intellectual disability (ID). The CAT is a holistic framework comprised of four dimensions: (a) the state of the art of the CAT; (b) the theoretical resources which are at the core of the CAT; (c) a series of empirical…

Purpose: Overt marking of "BE" in nonmainstream adult dialects of English is influenced by a number of linguistic constraints, including the structure's person, number, tense, contractibility, and grammatical function. In the current study, the authors examined the effects of these constraints on overt marking of "BE" in…

This article reports a post hoc analysis conducted as part of a larger study in which 61 typically developing, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were assessed in phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary (i.e., receptive, expressive, and definitional), and grammatical skill at baseline and 3, 6, and 9 months later. The larger study's purpose was to shed light…

Although children's early language skills have been found to predict literacy outcomes, little is known about the role of preschool oral narrative skills in the pathway between language and emergent literacy or how these associations differ by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The current study uses the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study to…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar)…