Language is the basis of human communication and is the most important key to complete mental development and thinking. Therefore, children must learn to communicate using appropriate language. For this to happen, the development of language in the child must be understood as a biological process, complete with internal laws and with marked stages…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

Vygotsky considered vraschivaniya, or 'ingrowing', an indispensable stage in the 'internalization' of meaning and described three different ways this could happen. But were these different ways options or substages? By logico-semantic analysis of Vygotsky's notebooks and published texts, and by recontextualizing them historically, I show that what…

Children with disabilities and developmental delays (DD) often face challenges within education systems, which are typically unprepared to meet their language needs nor equipped to support bilingualism because of the current early intervention (EI) workforce. Given this, the five-language domains framework can help bilingual EI educators to…

Vygotsky measured his 'zone of proximal development' in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday's categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent…

Proverbs, which have been evaluated as a very rich heritage of collective wisdom and experience in society, are loved by people who prefer spicing up a conversation with the tips of wisdom to 'convince' others to 'prove' their point of view and actions. The paper explores semantic models of proverbs which denote the status of children in the…

In six analyses using the Child Language Data Exchange System known as CHILDES, we explored whether and how parents and their 1.5- to 5-year-old children talk about writing. Parent speech might include information about the similarity between print and speech and about the difference between writing and drawing. Parents could convey similarity…

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous…

The author shares her insights about the principles and knowledge of the writing system that children discover, develop, and learn to control. She categorizes these principles as functional principles, linguistic principles, and relational principles. (CT)

To compare Japanese autistic children's use of semantic knowledge and theory of mind with mentally retarded and typically developing children's, they were tested on their comprehension of active and passive sentences and false belief understanding. Autistic children were sensitive to plausibility levels of semantic bias as were 4-year-olds with…