The goals of the current study were (a) to assess differences in child and adult pausing and (b) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from 10 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of…

Previous studies of children with language impairment (LI) reveal an insensitivity to aspect that may constitute part of the children's deficit. In this study, we examine aspect as well as tense in Hungarian-speaking children with LI. Twenty-one children with LI, 21 TD children matched for age, and 21 TD children matched for receptive vocabulary…

In this study, 5-year-olds and adults described scenes that differed according to whether (a) the subject or object of a transitive verb represented an accessible or inaccessible referent, consistent or inconsistent with patterns of preferred argument structure, and (b) a simple noun was sufficient to uniquely identify an inaccessible referent.…

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children…

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from…

The relation of social and linguistic input measures to early vocabulary development was examined in 30 low-income African American mother-infant pairs. Observations were conducted when the child was 0 years, 1 month (0;1), 0;4, 0;8, 1;0, 1;6, and 2;0. Maternal input was coded for word types and tokens, contingent responsiveness, and…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

Bilingualism is often considered an inappropriate developmental choice for children with specific language impairment (SLI) because, according to a widespread belief, these children's limited capacity for language would be overtaxed by learning two linguistic systems. However, there has not been adequate empirical investigation of SLI in bilingual…

Investigates language-normal one-year-olds' (N=14) and language-impaired two- and three-year-olds' (N=10) acquisition of words referring to three types of action. Findings revealed that, although both groups produced few of the words, the language-normal subjects comprehended the different types of action, whereas the impaired subjects did not.…

To examine possible explanations of reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, study compared repetitions of 54 SLI children and peers for number and type of error, latency, and duration of response. Found no evidence of differences between groups in auditory discrimination or response…

Comparison of Italian and English-speaking children's (N=200) segmentation abilities indicated that the discrepancies between the language groups reflected the children's phonologic and orthographic differences. (CB)

Examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single word utterances. (EKN)

Analyzes speech samples from 9- to 12-year olds with specific language impairment. There were few differences between utterances that did and did not include correctly inflected forms; errors occurred on words later in an utterance. Slowed processing in a limited system handling several operations in parallel may lead to the omission of…

When lexical availability was manipulated through discourse support and word frequency for 40 target nouns, measurement of effects on length, complexity, order of mention, and fluency of 4- to 8-year-olds' utterances showed that the number and length of responses containing the target word varied with age, word frequency, and discourse support…

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)