Purpose: Prior work has found that "late talkers" (LTs) as a group continue to demonstrate lower language and reading outcomes compared to their typically developing (TD) peers even into young adulthood. Others identified that children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) show difficulties later with theory of mind (ToM)…

A key question in developmental research concerns how children learn associations between words and meanings in their early language development. Given a vast array of possible referents, how does the child know what a word refers to? We contend that onomatopoeia (e.g. "knock," "meow"), where a word's sound evokes the sound…

In this study, it was aimed to determine the words frequently used in Turkish lullabies and to evaluate the contributions of the lullabies to language education and development through the words determined. Qualitative document analysis was used in the study. "Turkish Lullabies" by Demir and Demir (2014) and "Turkish Lullabies from…

Similes require two different pragmatic skills: appreciating the intended similarity and deriving a scalar implicature (e.g., "Lucy is like a parrot" normally implies that Lucy is not a parrot), but previous studies overlooked this second skill. In Experiment 1, preschoolers (N = 48; ages 3-5) understood "X is like a Y" as an…

Despite the advances in technology and sign language awareness, many Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children have language delays as a consequence of difficulty accessing a language model. These delays are often particularly pronounced in the domain of pragmatics, where the language user takes into account the people they are communicating with…

This study examined the development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional narratives using a storytelling/story-acting practice where children told stories to and for their friends. Evaluative language orients the audience to the teller's cognitive and emotional engagement with a story's events and characters, and we hypothesized…

The aim of this study is to determine the mental images of preschool teachers' perceptions through metaphors about language development. Participating in the study was voluntary and a total of 110 preschool teachers participated in the study. The phenomenology design from the qualitative research designs was administrated in this study, aiming to…

This case study aims to explore English language vocabulary acquisition experiences and conceptualizations of a single adult English language learner with mild dyslexia by drawing on metaphors and semi-structured interviews. In the study, we aimed to view the learner's perception through different lenses to gain deeper insight into her ulterior…

The generalisation of linguistic constructions is performed through analogical reasoning. Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) are impaired in analogical reasoning and in generalisation. However, these processes are improved by an input involving variability and similarity. Here we investigated the performance of children with or…

During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more…

Mentalising has long been suggested to play an important role in irony interpretation. We hypothesised that another important cognitive underpinning of irony interpretation is likely to be children's capacity for mental set switching -- the ability to switch flexibly between different approaches to the same task. We experimentally manipulated…

This article reviews two aspects of human learning: (1) people draw inferences that appear to rely on hierarchical conceptual representations; (2) some categories are much easier to learn than others given the same number of exemplars, and some categories remain difficult despite extensive training. Both of these results are difficult to reconcile…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…