Research suggests that girls acquire language faster than boys, with gender differences most pronounced in vocabulary acquisition during early childhood. This study examines the role of gender in the acquisition of vocabulary and morphosyntax in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children aged 18 to 36 months. Using the Palestinian Arabic Communicative…

Children's speech is influenced by the speech they hear, in particular by the parental speech addressed directly to them. The aim of this study was to analyse toddlers' speech with their parents and to investigate the influence of specific characteristics of child-directed speech on child speech in real time during mother-child and father-child…

In a changing society where the roles of fathers and mothers in caregiving are becoming more equal, the role of the father in early language development has also changed. We aimed to study associations between paternal factors and early vocabulary development in boys and girls. In a longitudinal cohort study, we examined the growth of expressive…

While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers…

This article presents a cross-cultural comparison of the size and composition of the expressive vocabulary of young children speaking two dialectal varieties of South American Spanish. Ninety-one Peruvian and 91 Argentinian toddlers (mean age: 22.5 months), matched on gender, age and maternal education, were assessed through the respective…

This study explored associations between mothers' language teaching practices and children's language skills concurrently and longitudinally, while also taking into account the children's sex and mothers' education. Estonian mothers of 76 children reported their language teaching practices at child ages 3;0 and 4;0. Children's language…

This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…

During narration, speakers constantly choose appropriate referential forms (nominals or pronominals). Children may engage in this reference marking differently than adults. Discourse- or listener-oriented approaches make different predictions about referential behaviour in cognitively demanding situations: the first predicts a higher number of…

The focus of this article is Faroese children's early vocabulary acquisition using a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI) parental report. The study is a population-based cross-sectional study including 1135 children aged 8-36 months. The article has two objectives: the first is to describe the…

Parental reports are a widely-used source of information about infants' and toddlers' communicative skills, but parent-report instruments valid for children older than 30 months are less known. This study explored individual variability in children's communicative skills at the age of 3;0 via parental reports using the Estonian (E) CDI-III. The…

This study aims to investigate the linguistic organisation and coherence of personal narratives among children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to provide insight into their communication skills in everyday contexts. A cohort of 10-year-old Croatian-speaking children diagnosed with DLD (n = 50, M = 10;8) and their gender-matched…

The current study examined how morpho-semantic processing of derivational morphology develops from later childhood through adolescence to adulthood in Finnish. Finnish is a synthetic language rich both in derivation and inflection. It has been suggested that children gradually acquire the ability to process morphologically complex word structures.…

The results from a large-scale study on toddlers' language acquisition in European Portuguese are presented. Toddlers' lexical and grammatical competencies were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results, based on 3012 reports completed by parents, indicate an increase in the lexical…

The growth rate and the composition of expressive lexicon was studied in a sample of 903 infants between the age of 0;8 and 1;4 whose parents completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory-Words and Gestures. As expected, older children had on average larger vocabularies compared to younger children.…

Children's narrative abilities in the preschool years have been found to predict their later literacy skills. Mothers' verbalizations during shared personal narratives with their preschoolers have been shown to facilitate children's development of narrative skills. The present study sought to extend the literature by investigating mothers' use of…