The role of children's verbal repetition of parents' utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults' and children's spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child…

A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word…

This study examines the influence of bilingual status, language-internal (complexity of L1 phonology), language-external (dominance), and lexical (L2 vocabulary score) factors on phonological production in French-speaking monolingual (n = 37) and bilingual children (n = 64) aged three to six years. Children participated in an object and picture…

To track the course of development in children's fine-grained perception of Mandarin tones, the present study explored how categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin tones emerges along age among 70 four- to seven-year-old children and 16 adults. Prominent discrimination peaks were found for both the child and the adult groups, and they were well…

Production studies show connective acquisition by age 3;0, but comprehension studies show errors until 9;0 or older. To further investigate this gap, two comprehension tasks were carried out with 78 Dutch children between the ages of 7;0 and 10;1, testing contrastive "maar" 'but' and causal "want" 'because' connectives for…

Conventional implicatures are omnipresent in daily life communication but experimental research on this topic is sparse, especially research with children. The aim of this study was to investigate if eight- to twelve-year-old children spontaneously make the conventional implicature induced by "but," "so," and…

Speakers of all ages spontaneously gesture as they talk. These gestures predict children's milestones in vocabulary and sentence structure. We ask whether gesture serves a similar role in the development of narrative skill. Children were asked to retell a story conveyed in a wordless cartoon at age five and then again at six, seven, and eight.…

Links between young children's everyday use of mindful conversational skills and their success on laboratory tests of theory of mind understanding (ToM) were evaluated. Using published scales, teachers rated the conversational behavior and shyness of 129 children aged 60 to 101 months (M = 78·8 months) who were in their first years of primary…

The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98…

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the…

Two experiments are described which explore the relationship between parental reports of infants' receptive vocabularies at 1 ; 6 () or 1 ; 3, 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 9 () and the comprehension infants demonstrated in a preferential looking task. The instrument used was the Oxford CDI, a British English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Words &…

Examination of the types of linguistic knowledge that affect three- to nine-year-olds' (N=60) and adults' (N=12) ability to understand and produce novel compounds in Hebrew revealed that comprehension was achieved ahead of production. Knowledge of morphological form had little effect on comprehension, but was crucial to production. (Author/CB)

The ability to make clear reference in connected discourse was examined in children learning Cantonese, a Chinese language where noun phrase constituents, whatever their grammatical role, are omissible from sentences under discourse conditions that are not well-understood. Forty-three typically developing children aged 3;0, 5;0, 7;0 and 12;0 told…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

When Israeli four- to six-year-olds (N=120) wrote pairs of nouns sharing a syllable and sentences sharing either mainly nouns or mainly verbs, analysis indicated that the older the children, the more their invented writing reflected common linguistic elements and length of utterance. Nouns were represented in children's written productions earlier…