Research has shown a link between the acquisition of numerical concepts and language, but exactly how linguistic input matters for numerical development remains unclear. Here, we examine both symbolic (number word knowledge) and non-symbolic (numerical discrimination) numerical abilities in a population in which access to language is limited early…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

This study examines the role of receptive vocabulary knowledge on outcomes of the TOEFL reading comprehension task. Participants included 18 native speakers of Spanish learning English as a foreign language and 17 native speakers of English ranging in age from 19-25 years. Lexical stimuli were presented auditorily and were divided into…

This study investigated the extent to which parental language input to children with hearing loss (HL) prior to cochlear implant (CI) differs from input to children with typical hearing (TH). A 20-min parent-child interaction sample was collected for 13 parent-child dyads in the HL group and 17 dyads in the TH group during free play. Ten minutes…

Purpose: Child phonologists have long been interested in how tightly speech input constrains the speech production capacities of young children, and the question acquires clinical significance when children with hearing loss are considered. Children with sensorineural hearing loss often show differences in the spectral and temporal structures of…

While most studies that explored children's incidental literacy acquisition focused on input from written text, this quantitative-qualitative study investigated the effects of using audio-visual input through close-captioned Aesop's Fables cartoons from PinkFong and Task-Induced Involvement (n=6 eight-year old pupils). Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test…

A battery of standardized language tests and control measures was administered to three groups of at-risk language learners -- internationally adopted children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and children with specific language impairment -- and to groups of second-language learners and typically developing monolingual children. All…

Developmental psychology plays a central role in shaping evidence-based best practices for prelingually deaf children. The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis (Conway et al., 2009) asserts that a lack of auditory stimulation in deaf children leads to impoverished implicit sequence learning abilities, measured via an artificial grammar learning (AGL)…

Pierce "et al." (2017) have proposed that variations in the timing, quality and quantity of language input during the earliest stages of development are related to variations in the development of phonological working memory and, in turn, to later language learning outcomes. To examine this hypothesis, three groups of children who are…

Purpose: The authors investigated the influence of social environmental variables and age at implantation on language development in children with cochlear implants. Method: Participants were 25 children with cochlear implants and their parents. Age at implantation ranged from 6 months to 42 months (M[subscript age] = 20.4 months, SD = 22.0…

Hearing loss during the critical period for language acquisition restricts spoken language input. This input limitation, in turn, may hamper syntactic development. This study examined the comprehension, production, and repetition of Wh-questions in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. The participants were 11 orally trained Hebrew-speaking…

Hearing parents of deaf or partially deaf infants are confronted with the complex question of communication with their child. This question is complicated further by conflicting advice on how to address the child: in spoken language only, in spoken language supported by signs, or in signed language. This paper studies the linguistic environment…

Recent neurobiological studies have advanced the hypothesis that language development is not continuously plastic but is governed by biological constraints that may be modified by experience within a particular time window. This hypothesis is tested based on spontaneous speech data from deaf cochlear-implanted (CI) children with access to…

This paper reports the results of two studies of reading comprehension of Flemish children in Belgium. In the northern part of Belgium (Flanders), Dutch is the official language. The Dutch-speaking inhabitants of Flanders are called Flemish. Dutch is also the national language of the Netherlands. Despite both groups using Dutch, cultural…

The acquisition of case and gender marking on the definite and indefinite article was studied in a sample of 6 normally-hearing children and 9 children with cochlear implants. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data are used. Children were matched by MLU, with 4 MLU levels: 1.8, 2.8, 3.6, 4.8. Age ranges for normally-hearing children were 1;4 to 3;8…