The ability to distinguish lies from sincere false statements requires understanding a speaker's communicative intentions and is argued to develop through linguistic interaction. We tested whether this ability was delayed in 26 children with severe-to-profound hearing loss who, based on vocabulary size, were thought to have relatively limited…

When linguistic input contains inconsistent use of grammatical forms, children produce these forms more consistently, a process called "regularization." Deaf children learning American Sign Language from parents who are non-native users of the language regularize their parents' inconsistent usages. In studies of artificial languages…

Organized semantic representations encoding across- and within-domain distinctions are a hallmark of mature cognition, and understanding how they change with experience and learning is a key endeavor in developmental science. Existing computational modeling studies provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how structured semantic…

The words in children's language learning environments are strongly predictive of cognitive development and school achievement. But how do we measure language environments and do so at the scale of the many words that children hear day in, day out? The quantity and quality of words in a child's input are typically measured in terms of total amount…

The aim of this study was to develop a measurement approach to assess the learning opportunities provided by parents to their young children with autism spectrum disorder during a free play task and to examine the relationship between learning opportunities and child performance on measures of cognition, autism spectrum disorder symptoms, and…

Background: The facilitating role of sleep for language learning is well-attested in adults and to a lesser extent in infants and toddlers. However, the longitudinal relationship between sleep patterns and early vocabulary development is not well understood. Methods: This study investigates how measures of sleep are related to the development of…

Second-language learners display poorer general language skills in the language used at school than their monolingual peers, which is a concern because general language skills (vocabulary, grammar, language expression, and comprehension) provide the foundation for later academic success. In a randomized controlled trial, we examined the efficacy…

The aim of the current study is to determine what language activities Norwegian preschool children took part in, and to examine whether these language activities predict children's language comprehension. We tested children (n = 134) with language measures at age 4/5 and age 5/6 and interviewed their teachers (n = 71) about the kinds of language…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a foundational skill related to understanding the thoughts, beliefs, and desires of oneself and others. There are child factors that play an important role in the development of ToM (e.g., language and vocabulary) as well as environmental factors (e.g., conversations among family members and socioeconomic status). In this…

Background: Strong associations between infant vocabulary and school-age language and literacy skills would have important practical and theoretical implications: Preschool assessment of vocabulary skills could be used to identify children at risk of reading and language difficulties, and vocabulary could be viewed as a cognitive foundation for…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…

Background: Girls with fragile X syndrome (FXS) have a wide range of cognitive and language abilities. The range of language outcomes experienced by girls with FXS, however, has been relatively unexplored. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine receptive and expressive language, with a focus on vocabulary and syntax, in a group of…

In the present study, primary school children's ability to give accurate confidence judgments (CJ) was addressed, with a special focus on uncertainty monitoring. In order to investigate the effects of memory retrieval processes on monitoring judgments, item difficulty in a vocabulary learning task (Japanese symbols) was manipulated. Moreover, as a…

Repetition priming refers to the facilitation of stimulus processing due to prior processing of the same or similar stimulus, and is one of the most primitive ways in which experience and practice can affect performance. Previous studies have produced contradictory results regarding the stability of repetition priming across development. Drawing…

The nature of predictive relations between early language and later cognitive function is a fundamental question in research on human cognition. In a longitudinal study assessing speed of language processing in infancy, Fernald, Perfors and Marchman (2006 ) found that reaction time at 25 months was strongly related to lexical and grammatical…