We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as…

This study compares the use of the variable (q), which is realized as rural [q] and urban [?], in the speech of twenty-two parents and their twenty-one children from the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. The study shows that children acquire the general gendered linguistic pattern of the community but do not replicate the linguistic frequencies…

This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina "et al.," 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider…

The 'root infinitive' phenomenon in child speech is known from major languages such as Dutch. In this case study, a child acquiring the Papuan language Nungon in a remote village setting in Papua New Guinea uses two different non-finite verb forms as predicates of main clauses ('root' contexts) between ages 2;3 and 3;3. The first root non-finite…

This study focuses on the relationship between content elements and mental-state language in narratives from twenty-seven children with autism (ASD), twelve children with language impairment (LI), and thirty typically developing children (TD). The groups did not differ on chronological age (10;6-14;0) and non-verbal cognitive skills, and the…

Valid indigenous language assessments are needed to further our understanding of how children learn language around the world. We assessed the psychometric properties and performance of two caregiver-report measures of Wolof language skill (language milestones achieved and vocabulary knowledge) for 500 children (ages 0;4 to 2;6) living in rural…

A battery of standardized language tests and control measures was administered to three groups of at-risk language learners -- internationally adopted children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and children with specific language impairment -- and to groups of second-language learners and typically developing monolingual children. All…

The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German…

This study examined the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input to toddlers with moderate hearing loss (MHL) compared with toddlers with normal hearing (NH). The linguistic input to eighteen toddlers with MHL and twenty-four toddlers with NH was examined during a 10-minute free-play activity in their home environment. Results showed that…

Pierce "et al." (2017) have proposed that variations in the timing, quality and quantity of language input during the earliest stages of development are related to variations in the development of phonological working memory and, in turn, to later language learning outcomes. To examine this hypothesis, three groups of children who are…

We explored the vocabulary and metaphor comprehension of learners of English as an additional language (EAL) in the first two years of UK primary school. EAL vocabulary knowledge is believed to be a crucial predictor of (reading) comprehension and educational attainment (Murphy, 2018). The vocabulary of five- to seven-year-old children with EAL…

This study investigated how Turkish-speaking children and adults interpret negative sentences with disjunction (English "or") and ones with conjunction (English "and"). The goal was to see whether Turkish-speaking children and adults assigned the same interpretation to both kinds of sentences and, if not, to determine the…

Recent research on adult German suggests that speakers use particular pitch accent types to signal the information status of discourse referents. This study investigates to what extent German five- and seven-year-olds have acquired this mapping. Semi-natural speech data was obtained from a picture-elicited narration task in which the information…

Research has shown that observing iconic gestures helps typically developing children (TD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI) learn new words. So far, studies mostly compared word learning with and without gestures. The present study investigated word learning under two gesture conditions in children with and without language…