To become successful communicators, children must be sensitive to the clarity/ambiguity of language. Significant gains in children's ability to detect communicative ambiguity occur during the early school-age years. However, little is known about the cognitive abilities that support this development. Relations between cognitive flexibility and…

In recent years, many children from Eastern European orphanages have been adopted by families in the United States. When children begin life with their new families, they experience an abrupt language shift in which the learning of their native language halts as the learning of the new language commences. Without the support of their native…