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…

This study evaluates the ability of different measures of socioeconomic status (SES) to predict lexical outcomes for preschoolers raised in a context of nationwide bilingualism. The participants were 58 children aged 3;11-4;3 from Maltese-dominant homes who attended state preschools. Receptive picture name judgement and picture naming, in Maltese…

In this study, age of onset (AoO) was investigated in five- and six-year-old bilingual Frisian-Dutch children. AoO to Dutch ranged between zero and four and had a positive effect on Dutch receptive vocabulary size, but hardly influenced the children's accurate use of Dutch inflection. The influence of AoO on vocabulary was more prominent than the…

This study examined the development of and possible predictors of interrogative forms and functions in early childhood Mandarin. All the interrogatives drawn from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) were analyzed. The main results indicated that (i) there were significant age effects in interrogative forms and…

Four- and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the…

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.…

This study examined the vocabulary development of Norwegian second language (L2) learners with Urdu/Punjabi as their first language (L1) at two time-points from kindergarten to primary school, and compared it to the vocabulary development of monolingual Norwegian children. Using path models, the associations between number of picture books in the…

This longitudinal study involving 101 Dutch four- and five-year-olds charts indirect request (IR) and mental state term (MST) understanding and investigates the role that Theory of Mind (ToM) and general linguistic ability (vocabulary, syntax, and spatial language) play in this development. The results showed basic understanding of IR and MST in…

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…

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…

57 Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from…

The current study attempts to differentiate effects of phonotactic probability (i.e. the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence), neighbourhood density (i.e. the number of phonologically similar words), word frequency, and word length on expressive vocabulary development by young children. Naturalistic conversational samples for three…

We investigated infant precursors of low language scores in early childhood. The sample included 373 probands in 130 monozygotic (MZ) and 109 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs in which at least one member of the pair scored in the lowest 15th percentile of a control sample on a general language factor derived from tester-administered tests at…