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…

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb…

Social deficits have been implicated in the language delays and deficits of children with autism (ASD); thus, the extent to which these children use language input in social contexts similarly to typically developing (TD) children is unknown. The current study investigated how caregiver input influenced the development of "wh"-question…

Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were…

Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Goksun, Kuntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

This study measured longitudinal change in six parameters of infant utterances (i.e. number of sounds, CV syllables, supraglottal consonants, and repetitions per utterance, temporal duration, and seconds per sound), investigated previously unexplored characteristics of repetition (i.e. number of vowel and CV syllable repetitions per utterance) and…

The aim of this study was to examine what four-year-old children repair in their speech. For this purpose, conversational self-repairs (N = 316) made by two typically developing Finnish-speaking children (aged 4 ; 8 and 4 ; 11) were examined. The data comprised eight hours of natural interactions videotaped at the children's homes. The tapes were…

In order to examine whether children adjust their phonetic speech categories, children of two age groups, five-year-olds and eight-year-olds, were exposed to a video of a face saying /aba/ or /ada/ accompanied by an auditory ambiguous speech sound halfway between /b/ and /d/. The effect of exposure to these audiovisual stimuli was measured on…