Codeswitching has been used as a tool to investigate how the properties of the two language systems interact in the bilingual mind with relatively few studies investigating bilingual children. We target two groups of L1-Spanish-L2-English children in Spain to address language activation and language inhibition in the processing of codeswitching…

Recent evidence suggests that deaf children with CIs exposed to nonnative sign language from hearing parents can attain age-appropriate vocabularies in both sign and spoken language. It remains to be explored whether deaf children with CIs who are exposed to early nonnative sign language, but only up to implantation, also benefit from this input…

Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon -- known as phonetic alignment -- has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns…

Purpose: This study investigated Icelandic-speaking children's acquisition of singleton consonants and consonant clusters. Method: Participants were 437 typically developing children aged 2;6-7;11 (years;months) acquiring Icelandic as their first language. Single-word speech samples of the 47 single consonants and 45 consonant clusters were…

During narration, speakers constantly choose appropriate referential forms (nominals or pronominals). Children may engage in this reference marking differently than adults. Discourse- or listener-oriented approaches make different predictions about referential behaviour in cognitively demanding situations: the first predicts a higher number of…

The purpose of this study is to examine the bidirectional relationship between children's language development and challenging behaviors as well as the moderating roles of gender and race/ethnicity. We conducted a number of structural equation modeling analyses with a national representative sample (N = 2,462) of Head Start children from the 2014…

This study aims to investigate the linguistic organisation and coherence of personal narratives among children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to provide insight into their communication skills in everyday contexts. A cohort of 10-year-old Croatian-speaking children diagnosed with DLD (n = 50, M = 10;8) and their gender-matched…

This study compares the use of the variable (q), which is realized as rural [q] and urban [?], in the speech of twenty-two parents and their twenty-one children from the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. The study shows that children acquire the general gendered linguistic pattern of the community but do not replicate the linguistic frequencies…

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks,…

Late identification of children with ASD remains a concern. Due to limited research in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) such as South Africa (SA), the early management of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) should be further explored. The aim was to describe the demographic characteristics and early management of ASD that may influence…

Child gender has been proved to affect toddlers'/children's language development in several studies, but its effect was not found to be stable across different ages or various aspects of language ability. The effect of gender on toddler's, children's and adolescents' language ability was examined in the present meta-analysis of ten Slovenian…

Purpose: This research explored syntactic growth in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) over a 5-year period, and variability in growth in relation to autism symptoms, nonverbal cognition, maternal responsivity, and gender. Method: Language samples at 4 time points from 39 children with FXS, 31 boys and 8 girls, were analyzed using the Index of…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…

Purpose: This study investigated children's acquisition of Hong Kong Cantonese. Method: Participants were 1,726 children ages 2;4 to 12;4 (years;months). Single-word speech samples were collected to examine 4 measures: initial consonants, final consonants, vowels/diphthongs, and lexical tones. A 2-way analysis of variance was performed to examine…

The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children from 10 non-English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with adapted versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08 to 2.06. The results showed that girls are…