Recent studies have found correlations between sentence-level tests and reading comprehension. However, the task demands of sentence-level tests are not well understood. The present study investigated syntactic knowledge as a construct by examining the convergent and discriminant validity of two sentence-level tasks, sentence comprehension and…

Several studies investigated preschoolers' ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate…

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have language difficulties of unknown origin. Syntactic profiles are atypical, with poor performance on non-canonical structures, e.g. object relatives, suggesting a localized deficit. However, existing analyses using ANOVAs are problematic because they do not systematically address unequal…

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting…

The aims of the study were to establish whether there is a correlation between the socioeconomic background of Afrikaans-speaking children and their performance on a dialect-neutral language test, and to ascertain whether the allowance the test currently makes for parental education level is sufficient. The Afrikaans version of the…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

Examines the relationship between adult recasts of child utterances and the child's acquisition of syntactic structures. Results indicate that maternal recasts of specific morphemes were related to the acquisition of those specific morphemes during certain developmental periods, whereas other grammatical morphemes were facilitated by expansions…

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency…

Investigation of the degree to which cue validity predicted the actual strength of grammatical cues as they are used by speakers of Hebrew revealed strong positive correlations between estimated cue validities and actual cue strengths for all but the youngest age groups of speakers. (Author/CB)

Three studies assessing language comprehension of infants and toddlers through a method requiring a minimum of motor movement, no speech production, and differential visual fixation of two simultaneously presented video events provide insight into children's emerging linguistic capabilities and help resolve controversies about language production…