This Family and Practitioner Brief discusses how deaf children who have not had access to a complete language from birth often encounter unique challenges in developing academic language skills, particularly in the realm of inference-making.

This dissertation investigates the interaction of developing extralinguistic cognitive systems with early language learning and processing through the case study of verb argument structure. The interaction of these systems with the linguistic system underpins fundamental theories of language learning and use: language does not exist in isolation.…

Does language have a role to play in conceptual development, and if so, what is that role? Understanding the contents of another person's mind parallels the development in early childhood of mental state language. Does the conceptual understanding get reflected in and drive the language development, or does the language allow the representation of…

This study draws on four case studies of young children in order to explore the relationship between children's action schema [Athey, C. (1990). "Extending though in young children: A parent-teacher partnership." London: Paul Chapman] and their developing speech, language and communication. What emerged was a connection through…

This dissertation focuses on when and how children learn about the meanings of the propositional attitude" verbs know" and "think". "Know" and "think" both express belief. But they differ in their veridicality: "think" is non-veridical and can report a false belief; but "know" can only…

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a…

Children's ability to exercise selective trust is crucial for the development of their knowledge and successful socialization. For speakers of some languages, evidentials, which are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers, could provide valuable support of these processes. Focusing on Bulgarian, this chapter situates children's use of evidentials…

In this paper we consider the perceptual and conceptual contributions that shape early word learning, using research on the "shape bias" as a case in point. In our view, conceptual, linguistic, social-pragmatic, and perceptual sources of information influence one another powerfully and continuously in the service of word learning throughout…

Young children experience considerable difficulty in learning their first few color terms. One explanation for this difficulty is that initially they lack a conceptual representation of color sufficiently abstract to support word meaning. This hypothesis, that prior to learning color terms children do not represent color as an abstraction, was…

What is questioned here is not the teaching of words but their premature imposition upon the child before he has acquired the concepts that underlie them. (Author)

A series of studies on young children's use of the terms "same" and "different" are reported. The work began from the observation that young children could respond correctly to instructions involving "same" but were often incorrect in response to "different". This finding was replicated under a variety of experimental conditions and found to be…

Children's errors and slips, their incomplete and partially right answers are often more illuminating and informative of a child's stages of language development and his thought processes and are of greater value for future action by the teacher than are the number of correct answers in a formal right, wrong testing situation. (Author)

Investigates potential causes of decrements in children's understanding of the words "big" and "tall" by comparing results of studies of English-speaking children and results of a study of Arabic-speaking children. (Author/RH)

Investigated the interpretation of the word "big" by 40 children of 3 to 5 years. The type and orientation of objects used in the study were varied. Results demonstrated that contextual factors influenced children's responses. (RJC)

Jean Piaget's ideas regarding symbolic function are expanded in this paper to provide a model to use in distinguishing between general symbolic versus specific linguistic deficits in language disordered children (whose disorders are not due primarily to intellectual, sensory, motor, or social-emotional deficits). In applying this model to the…