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…

The present study reports on a developmental and cross-linguistic study of oral narratives produced by speakers of Zulu (a Bantu language) and French (a Romance language). Specifically, we focus on oral narrative performance as a bimodal (i.e., linguistic and gestural) behaviour during the late language acquisition phase. We analyzed seventy-two…

The aim of the present study was to examine the contextual effects of social games on prelinguistic vocalizations. The two main goals were to (1) investigate the functions of vocalizations as symptoms of affective arousal and symbols of social understanding, and (2) explore form-function (de)coupling relations between vocalization types and game…

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7-8 years of age) but not younger…

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.…

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…

Young children typically do not use order-of-mention to resolve ambiguous pronouns, but may do so if given additional cues, such as gestures. Additionally, this ability to utilize gestures may be enhanced in bilingual children, who may be more sensitive to such cues due to their unique language experience. We asked monolingual and bilingual…

Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the…

The ability to understand references to the absent enables conversation to move beyond the here-and-now to matters distant in both space and time. Such understanding requires appreciating the relation between language and communicative intent: one must recognize speakers' intentions to use language to converge on a shared conversational focus that…

The types of gesture+speech combinations children produce during the early stages of language development change over time. This change, in turn, predicts the onset of two-word speech and thus might reflect a cognitive transition that the child is undergoing. An alternative, however, is that the change merely reflects changes in the types of…

Explores the ability of 5 children aged 1 month to 30 months to initiate and maintain topics of conversation. The data demonstrate that at the beginning of development children simply attract attention to themselves as the topic of conversation and that later, as their interests broaden, their topic repertoire expands. (Author/SED)

Examines the changes that occur from ages 5 to 11 in question/answer sequences of Dutch children. Function, content, form of questions, and listener response are analyzed. (EKN)