Purpose: This study presents a comprehensive exploration of lexical and grammatical development in Palestinian Arabic (PA). The study aims to test the validity of the Palestinian Arabic Communicative Development Inventory (PA-CDI) as well as generate growth curves for lexical and morphosyntactic development, examine the order of emergence of both…

Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal "be"-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as "wh"-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children's performance on these passives can be affected by the verb's lexical…

This paper sets out to peruse the role of various theories or more precisely, hypotheses invoked in second language acquisition (SLA) research by surveying three empirical studies pertaining to the critical period hypothesis in the SLA of phonetics and phonology. In particular, the three studies reviewed are titled in chronological order as (1)…

Conversely to plenty of studies describing how L1 transfer affects L2 systems, where the two grammars, L1/L2, often only come to interact later in life, less is known of dominant language transfer in heritage language grammars. Unlike in L2 speakers, the dominant language of the heritage speaker potentially affects its weaker language already from…

Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's…

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the…

We tested 12- and 18-month-old English-learning infants on a preferential-looking task which contrasted grammatically correct sentences using the determiner "the" vs. three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was substituted by another English function word, a nonsense word, or omitted. Our design involved strict controls…

This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using…

Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

There have been debates on the right age to start learning a foreign language, especially, English. A great number of researchers have revealed evidence to support the notion, 'the younger to start, the better'. In contrast, others argue and advocate for implementing instruction of English a little later in life. Studies also have revealed that…

The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of transcription skills, oral language skills, and executive functions to growth in narrative writing between fourth and sixth grade. While text length and story content of narratives did not increase with age, syntactic complexity of narratives showed a clear developmental progression. Results…

Background: Children with language impairment (LI) show heterogeneity in development. We tracked children from pre-school to middle childhood to characterize three developmental trajectories: resolving, persisting and emerging LI. Methods: We analyzed data from children identified as having preschool LI, or being at family risk of dyslexia,…

Several studies have demonstrated that children's gender and parental education exert a significant, but not equal, effect on toddler language development at different ages. This study determined the effect of children's gender and parental education on the verbal competence of toddlers between 16 and 30 months. The sample included 953 Slovenian…

This study investigates the syntactic abilities of ten individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) (mean chronological age: 8;9 years; mean mental age: 4;8 years) and Down's syndrome (DS) (mean chronological age: 8;7 years; mean mental age: 4;6 years), matched individually on chronological age, mental age and performance IQ. The syntactic components…