Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Media use could be detrimental to children's language and literacy skills because it may displace other language-enhancing activities like shared reading and caregiver-child interactions. Furthermore, the extent to which children use media with adults (joint media engagement), the extent to which they use interactive media (apps/games), and the…

This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether children exposed to 2 languages would benefit from the phonotactic probability cues of a single language in the same way as monolingual peers and to determine whether crosslinguistic influence would be present in a fast-mapping task. Method: Two groups of typically developing children…

Assessing the language development of bilingual children can be a challenge--too often, children in the complex process of learning both Spanish and English are under- or over-diagnosed with language disorders. SLPs can change that with "SALT 2010 Bilingual S/E Version" for grades K-3, the first tool to comprehensively assess children's language…

This paper reports on an ESRC-funded project that investigated the use of corpus-based activities in a primary-school context, with children aged 8-10 years. The study explored the contributions that could be made by a corpus--comprising language written for a child audience--and a modified version of the associated software, in helping these…