Inspired by research in language play and linguistic ethnography, this article examines children's language play in early childhood education and care (ECEC) as a locally situated generic practice created through children's semiotic repertoires. The article is based on video-recorded linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish day care centre.…

As early childhood education programming expands across the globe, there is an increased need to understand how features of these programs influence children's development. The composition of children's age within a classroom is one such feature, although it is much less studied than other features. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that…

The present article reports results of a real-world effectiveness trial conducted in Denmark with six thousand four hundred eighty-three 3- to 6-year-olds designed to improve children's language and preliteracy skills. Children in 144 child cares were assigned to a control condition or one of three planned variations of a 20-week storybook-based…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

Faroese is at the tail end of a change from an Icelandic-type syntax in which V-to-T is obligatory to a Danish-type system in which this movement is impossible. While the older word order is very rarely produced by adult Faroese speakers, there is evidence that this order is still marginally present in the adult grammar and thus only dispreferred,…

In her interesting article, Stoel-Gammon (this issue) reviews studies concerning the interactions between lexical and phonological development. While the focus of the review is on vocabulary production from children acquiring American English, she also suggests that cross-linguistic research be undertaken to examine how universal and…

A longitudinal study, intended to produce a profile of the relationship between cognitive, social, and linguistic development in Danish children, had as subjects a boy and a girl aged 11 and 8 months, who were observed until they reached age 3. Naturalistic language used by the children and their parents, videotaped during regular visits, was…

This paper focuses on parents' attitudes about their children's maintenance of their native language (L1). It is part of an inter-nordic study of immigrant languages between generation one and generation two, that interviewed 276 parents of North American, Finnish, Turkish, and Vietnamese origin, residing in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden.…