Cross-linguistic research has shown that object which-questions are the hardest types of wh-questions for children to comprehend and are acquired late. The present study asks when Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM), an early cue to object marking, is actively used to successfully comprehend object which-questions in Spanish-speaking…

Reading acquisition in Arabic presents unique challenges, notably due to its complex morphological structure and the diglossic nature of the language. The discrepancy between written (Modern Standard) and spoken Arabic poses significant barriers for learners, particularly in decoding morphologically complex words. This study explored the role of…

Many studies have shown that morphological knowledge has effects on reading comprehension separate from other aspects of language knowledge. This has implications for reading instruction and assessment: it suggests that children could have reading comprehension difficulties that are due to a lack of morphological knowledge, and thus, that explicit…

We investigated whether congruent action while reading informational texts about physics improves science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) vocabulary learning and reading comprehension. Second- and third-grade Spanish-speaking children (N = 216) were randomly assigned to one of five conditions implementing forms of Embodied-Action or…

During the second year of life, children acquire words and expand their receptive and expressive vocabularies at a rapid pace. At this age, toddlers' phonological abilities are also developing rapidly. The current study investigated the effect of phonological complexity of words on the order in which they are acquired, receptively and…

Research on the development of children's decontextualized language has focused primarily on their references to events displaced in time. Here, we examine children's early emerging ability to talk about individuals who are elsewhere and therefore not participating in the conversation. We analyzed the references made by three Mandarin-speaking…

This study explored associations between mothers' language teaching practices and children's language skills concurrently and longitudinally, while also taking into account the children's sex and mothers' education. Estonian mothers of 76 children reported their language teaching practices at child ages 3;0 and 4;0. Children's language…

We investigate the development of text reconstruction abilities in Hebrew-speaking children, with a particular focus on verbal passive constructions. The acquisition of verbal passives in Hebrew is a late developmental milestone, closely tied to the expression of event semantics. The current study explores how narrative and informative text genres…

The focus of this article is Faroese children's early vocabulary acquisition using a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI) parental report. The study is a population-based cross-sectional study including 1135 children aged 8-36 months. The article has two objectives: the first is to describe the…

We examined the concurrent relationship between narrative skills (the Renfrew Bus Story Test) and core language measures (vocabulary, grammar and verbal memory) at age 4 and the longitudinal relationship between core language and listening comprehension skills at age 7 in a sample of 215 children using latent variables and structural equation…

This study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with…

Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

Listening comprehension is important for daily communication and at school, yet relatively little is known about the variables contributing to listening comprehension, especially in the upper elementary years. The aim of this study was to explore whether vocabulary, verbal memory, but also self-efficacy and self-reported concentration contribute…

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children (N = 17). "Baby Birds/Baby Goats" from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age…

Prior research on reading difficulties has mainly focused on word decoding problems. However, there exists another group of children -- poor comprehenders (PCs) -- who have normal word decoding abilities but difficulties in reading comprehension. Less is known about PCs especially in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese. This study identified…