This article evaluates the acquisition of directionals in Q'anjob'al, a Western Mayan language of Guatemala. The data come from a longitudinal study of two Q'anjob'al monolingual children of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala: Xhuw (1;9-2;5) and Xhim (2;3-3;5). The results show how these children acquire the morphological distribution of…

The study adopts a multimodal perspective, looking at adults' use of gestures in variation sets (VS; i.e. sequences of partial self-repetitions occurring in successive utterances of varying form) addressed to Spanish-learning toddlers in adult-child interactions. We seek to address the following question: Do adults make simultaneous use of VS and…

In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9-2;10 and 2;3-3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

High rates of error and variability in early word production may signal speech sound disorder. However, there is little consensus regarding the degree of error and variability that may be expected in the typical range. Relatedly, while variables including child age, word frequency and word phonological neighbourhood density are associated with…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

The purpose of this study was to examine early fast mapping abilities in late talkers (LT) and typically developing (TD) Spanish-speaking children by considering the effect of different variables on fast mapping (age, vocabulary level, grammatical category and number morphology). Thirty-eight Spanish-speaking children were assessed at three times…

This cross-sectional study investigated the use of four verbal indices of social knowledge (personal pronouns, verb conjugations, people words and mental state language) and their concurrent relations in a sample of 287 Italian-speaking children between 18 and 36 months. Results showed that the production of all indices increased with age. Mental…

This cross-linguistic study investigated whether the native language has any influence on lexical composition among Italian (N = 125) and Finnish (N = 116) very preterm (born at <32 gestational weeks) children at 24 months (controls: 125 Italian and 146 Finnish full-term children). The investigation also covered the effect of maternal education…

Although virtually all Inuit children in eastern Arctic Canada learn Inuktitut as their native language, there is a critical lack of tools to assess their level of language ability. This article investigates how mean length of utterance (MLU), a widely-used assessment measure in English and other languages, can be best applied in Inuktitut. The…

The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4-2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across the…

This study examined lexical-phonological interactions in the first 50 words of a group of monolingual German- and Spanish-speaking children and bilingual German--Spanish children. The phonological characteristics of the earliest target word forms and output patterns of these children were analyzed to determine whether bilingual children select…

Infants across cultures need to identify the characteristics of their native languages in order to become competent speakers. The means by which Spanish-speaking children learn to produce number-gender linguistic markers has not been sufficiently investigated. Thirty-eight three-year-olds were tested in Berko-like production tasks, in which they…

This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese-English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller's hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between…