A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…

We investigated the association between individual differences in metaphor understanding and Theory of Mind (ToM) in typically developing children. We distinguished between two types of metaphors and created a Physical and Mental Metaphors task, echoing a similar distinction for ToM. Nine-year-olds scored lower than older age-groups in ToM as well…

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are…

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such…

This study examined on-line processing of Swedish sentences in a grammaticality-judgement experiment within the framework of the Competition Model. Three age groups from 6 to 11 and an adult group were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors concerning cue cost were studied: violation position (early vs. late),…

This study examined relationships between prelinguistic variables from the MacArthur-Bates CDI and the development of language comprehension and production in children with autism. Forty-four children were assessed at baseline and 6, 12, 24, 33 and 53 months later. Growth Curve Modeling was used to examine the extent to which three composite CDI…

When presented with a pair of objects, one familiar and one unfamiliar, and asked to select the referent of a novel word, children reliably demonstrate the disambiguation effect and select the unfamiliar object. The current study investigated two competing word learning accounts of this effect: a pragmatic account and a word learning principles…

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age less than 33 weeks and/or birth weight less than 1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term…

Investigated the effect of language on Chinese-speaking children's performance on false-belief tasks under three between-subjects conditions. Chinese-speaking adults and young children responded to false-belief tasks. Results revealed a rapid developmental pattern in the children's understanding of false beliefs and suggested the important role of…

An experiment on children aged 2 to 7 led to a critical evaluation of Piaget's implicit contention that young children use determiners anaphorically. It is suggested that the importance of young children's processing procedures on the linguistic environment has been underestimated in Piaget's interactive epistemology. (CHK)