The present study explores the ways in which young EFL learners draw on lived experiences, viewed as interactional experiences in L1 or L2 which they have participated in or observed, to ground their metapragmatic understandings. Building on previous research with adult (e.g. McConachy 2018) and young learners (Savic 2021; Savic and Myrset 2021),…

The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98…

Background: Research on retelling ability and cognition is limited in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and speech impairment. Aims: To explore the impact of expressive and receptive language, narrative discourse dimensions (Narrative Assessment Profile measures), auditory and visual memory, theory of mind (ToM) and non-verbal cognition on the…

We examined processing of verbal irony in three groups of children: (1) 18 children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD), (2) 18 typically-developing children, matched to the first group for verbal ability, and (3) 18 typically-developing children matched to the first group for chronological age. We utilized an irony…

Lexical development is a key facet of later language development. To characterize the linguistic knowledge of school age children, performance in the written modality must also be considered. This study tracks the growth of written text-embedded lexicon in Catalan-speaking children and adolescents. Participants (N = 2161), aged from 5 to 16 years…

This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of tense and agreement morphology by child L2 learners in an early stage of language acquisition. The objectives of this study are twofold. The first is to observe the development of verb inflections and syntactic competence over time from an early stage by Chinese child L2 learners of English. The…

The present linguistic analyses of two children (aged 8 and 10) with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and their two matched controls are based on dyadic therapist-child conversations and on picture description tasks. The circa 100 analysis features covering aspects of (i) lexicon (e.g. prominalization), (ii) structural characteristics of turns, (iii)…

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…

Reports on a study that investigated metacognitive strategy use by a pair of students working with a computer database. Strategies are inferred from analysis of the discourse, and features of a metacognitive environment are discussed. (13 references) (GLR)

This article presents three studies conducted in Canada and Australia that relate theory of mind (ToM) development to mental state discourse. In Study 1, mental state discourse was examined while parents and their 5-7-year-old children jointly read a storybook which had a surprise ending about the identity of the main character. Comments specific…