This study examined whether children use prosodic correlates to word meaning when interpreting novel words. For example, do children infer that a word spoken in a deep, slow, loud voice refers to something larger than a word spoken in a high, fast, quiet voice? Participants were 4- and 5-year-olds who viewed picture pairs that varied along a…

To obtain reliable information, it is important to identify and effectively question knowledgeable informants. Two experiments examined how age and the ease of distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources influence children's ability to effectively question those sources to solve problems. A sample of 3- to 5-year-olds was introduced to…

We studied how Dutch children learned English as a second language (L2) in the classroom. Learners at different levels of L2 proficiency recognized words under different task conditions. Beginning learners in primary school (fifth and sixth grades) and more advanced learners in secondary school (seventh and ninth grades) made lexical decisions on…

Although emerging evidence suggests that parental behavior is related to the development of child executive functioning (EF), the mechanisms through which parenting affects child EF have yet to be investigated. The goal of this study was to examine the potential mediating role of child language in the prospective relation between maternal autonomy…

Using a name-based categorization task, Nazzi found in 2005 that French-learning 20-month-olds can make use of one-feature consonantal contrasts between new labels but fail to do so with one-feature vocalic contrasts. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels at…

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong…

This study investigates whether children's production and recognition of obligatory liaison sequences in French depend on the singular/plural orientation of nouns. Certain nouns occur more frequently in the plural (e.g., "arbre" "tree"), whereas others are found more often in the singular (e.g., "arc-en-ciel" "rainbow"). In the input, children…

A study of 104 Japanese-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds tested the relation between numeral and quantifier acquisition. A first study assessed Japanese children's comprehension of quantifiers, numerals, and classifiers. Relative to English-speaking counterparts, Japanese children were delayed in numeral comprehension at 2 years of age but showed no…

In learning the meaning of a new term, children need to fix its reference, learn its conventional meaning, and discover the meanings with which it contrasts. To do this, children must attend to adult speakers--the experts--and to their patterns of use. In the domain of color, children need to identify color terms as such, fix the reference of each…

Examined role of spontaneous gesture in 2- to 4-year-olds' counting and assessment of counting accuracy. Found that correspondence of children's speech and gesture varied systematically across age. Children adhered to one-to-one correspondence principle in gesture prior to speech. Counting accuracy related to correspondence of speech and gesture,…

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

Two experiments showed two-year-olds pairs of videotaped actions, one familiar and one novel, and asked them to select referents of novel verbs. For actions not involving objects, children tended to select the novel action over the familiar one in each of four experiments. For actions involving objects, novel actions were chosen more often than…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether children, ages 4-7 assign invariant labels to objects or describe the objects in terms of the context of alternatives. The acquisition of adjective ordering rules and information limits on children's utterances were also examined. (JMB)

Pointing gestures of verbally advanced two-year-olds were contrasted with those of less advanced peers to examine the relationships of gesture to language during the acquisition of each. Formal and functional aspects of each communicative skill were measured. Gesture and language corresponded only in their functional aspects. (Author/AS)

Analysis showed that the majority of subjects applied a coherent strategy to three-word utterances presented in different word orders, and confirmed the existence of two primitive strategies. (Authors/CB)