Examining the dimensionality of oral discourse language skills in early childhood is crucial in informing theories of language and literacy development. This study examined the factor structure of linguistic and discourse features in oral text production for second graders. A total of 330 English-speaking second graders (M[subscript age]= 7.33,…

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children's narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax,…

During narration, speakers constantly choose appropriate referential forms (nominals or pronominals). Children may engage in this reference marking differently than adults. Discourse- or listener-oriented approaches make different predictions about referential behaviour in cognitively demanding situations: the first predicts a higher number of…

This study examines the role of agency in a young trilingual child's language choice in interaction with her Mandarin-speaking grandparents. The child was born in Japan to a Chinese mother and a Japanese father. English is used as a lingua franca in the family. The study demonstrates how the child asserts her agency to negotiate the decisions and…

There is robust evidence that reading aloud with young children can help them learn new vocabulary. Building upon prior research, this study tested the effects of "both" book text features "and" readers' spontaneous extra-textual word-highlighting strategies on 3- to 4-year-olds' vocabulary retention from repeated read alouds…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…