Successful reference relies on being appropriately informative for listeners. What factors influence informativeness? For example, what factors influence the decision to refer to a ball with the less informative phrase "it," as opposed to the more informative phrase "the red ball"? The present dissertation proposes and…

The production of a well-constructed narrative is the culmination of several years of language acquisition and is an important milestone in children's development. There is no current description of narrative development for Catalan speaking children. This study collected elicited narratives in Catalan from 118 children aged 4;0-10;11. Narratives…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

Research Findings: Conversing abstract concepts boost children's language learning. Despite the numerous studies on the linguistic environment of early childhood education settings (ECE), most of this work disregards contextual factors that may influence abstract conversations and omits characteristics of children's verbal participation in these…

Conceptualizing numbers as discursive constructs generated in, and for the sake of, communication, we investigated the development of the numerical discourse of Milo, a boy who was 2 years and 8 months old when we first met him and whom we then followed for 18 months. Our analyses of the child's evolving responses to the question "Where is…

This study investigates parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning as constructed in 19 interviews with migrant parents of Polish ethnolinguistic background, resettled in Norway and caring for young preschoolers and school-goers. Targeting reported speech as a linguistic resource for enacting agency in discourse, the focal interest is in…

Claiming to rely on "science," many well-intentioned "experts" offer advice on how to "close the gap"--word gap, language gap, achievement gap--between disadvantaged and advantaged children. Based on both research and personal experience, this advice promises magic solutions to apparently complex and intractable…

This paper considers the overt and covert discourses in two contemporary policy documents in England and Wales, "The Nutbrown Review: Foundations for Quality" ([DfE] Department for Education Department for Education. 2012. "The Nutbrown Review: Foundations for Quality: The Independent Review of Early Education and Childcare…

Research Findings: This research examines preschoolers' use of mental state terms in naturally occurring peer conflicts in the classroom to determine how children use mental state terms for organizing their social interactions. Analyses focus on the types, frequencies, and social interactive functions of mental state terms. Utterances (N = 166)…

Recent research has demonstrated that parents' beliefs about their children's minds constitute an important environmental factor affecting children's development. One difficulty with this area of investigation is that beliefs are often implicit, unconscious, and not always accessible through direct questioning. This study addresses this difficulty…

Reviews three articles in this journal on pretend play and focuses on the communicative activity through which social pretending is created. Suggests that, despite recent advances toward understanding techniques by which children construct make-believe, further examination of conversational exchanges and sequences of this complex activity is…

How children use language affects the likelihood that a request will be granted. This study explored children's requests in a natural setting, by analyzing unedited letters to Santa from 824 children (20% age 6 and under; 41% age 7 and 8; and 39% age 9 and over) in the newspapers of a southeastern metropolitan area. Letters were examined for…

The creative oral language elicited from 45 preoperational and 40 concrete operational first grade students was analyzed to study the relationship between cognitive development and the types of case relationships produced. Each child's language was analyzed for eight noun/verb relationships, including state, process, action, experience, location,…