This study aimed to test three competing hypotheses concerning the strength of the cross-language relationship in listening comprehension proficiency in emergent bilinguals: Cummins's developmental linguistic interdependence hypothesis, Proctor, August, Snow, and Barr's interdependence continuum hypothesis, and Goodrich, Lonigan, Kleuver, and…

When speaking to young children, adults adapt their language to that of the child. In this article, we suggest that this child-directed speech (CDS) is the result of a transactional process of dynamic adaptation between the child and the adult. The study compares developmental trajectories of three children to those of the CDS of their caregivers.…

This article reviews some recent research on the development of temporal cognition, with reference to Weist's (1989) account of the development of temporal understanding. Weist's distinction between two levels of temporal decentering is discussed, and empirical studies that may be interpreted as measuring temporal decentering are described. We…

In an investigation of discourse sensitivity, Catalan-speaking children aged 4 to 8 years were asked two different questions in a picture description task. One was a wide-focus question ("What is happening?"); the other was a narrow-focus question ("What is happening to 'the patient'?"). Children of all age groups displayed sensitivity to the…

Attempts to characterize and contrast aspects of functional organization of neuropsychological systems carrying out primary language acquisition and two types of nonprimary language acquisition: secondary language acquisition and foreign language learning. There appears an intrinsic neurofunctional basis for the greater facility of young children…

Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES ( MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word-class n-gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade-offs in leading or following this…

Presents a case study of a bilingual two-year-old, documenting his translation skills between the age of 1 year, 11 months and 2 years, 5 months. Argues that critical insights into child language may be gained through the examination of a child's linguistic abilities in cognitively demanding situations. (SED)