Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to evaluate hypotheses that early sociocognition will predict later social communication and early phonology will predict later morphosyntax in clinically referred preschoolers. Method: Participants were 108 children ages 9-11 years who had been referred to clinical services with concerns about language at…

Across languages, onsets with large sonority distances are preferred to those with smaller distances (e.g., "bw greater than bd greater than lb"; Greenberg 1978). Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) attributes such facts to grammatical restrictions that are universally active in all grammars. To test this hypothesis, here we…

This article explores young children's facility in phonological awareness tasks requiring either the detection or the articulation of head, coda, onset, and rime subsyllabic units shared in word pairs. Data are reported from 70 nonreading children and 21 precocious readers attending preschools. Prereading children were able to articulate shared…