This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

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…

The study group consisted of 30 children with cochlear implants (CI) and 30 children with normal hearing (NH), whose ages were 4 years and 7 years 11 months. Turkish Test of Early Language Development (TEDIL) was used to assess the language skills of the children. Language samples were gathered by using Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI).…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

The nature of a specific spoken language as well as its orthography and the close relation between these two characteristics may influence phonemic awareness development (Durgunoglu & Öney, 1999). In this respect, oral language proficiency of bilingual and monolingual children appears to have an influence on enhancing their phonological…

The purpose of this study was to compare early speech and language development of children with and without cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) in the US and Slovakia from 6 to 24 months of age. Thirty-two children from the US (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) and Slovakia (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) participated in this study. The children…

According to the findings of several studies, parents' assessments of their toddler's language are valid and reliable evaluations of children's language competence, especially at early development stages. This study examined whether preschool teachers, who spend a relatively great deal of time with toddlers in various preschool activities and…

This study applies the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance measurement (PMLU; Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002) to the data of five children acquiring Finnish and evaluates their phonological development longitudinally at four different age points: 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6. The children's results on PMLU and related measures are discussed…

This paper explores language intervention for children with specific language impairment in Sweden. The elicitation strategies, style of interaction and language production used by speech and language pathologists (SLPs) were analyzed in two conditions, free conversation and training of grammar. In training, the grammatical targets were used…

The notion of language dominance is often defined in terms of proficiency. We distinguish dominance, as a property of the bilingual mind and a concept of language knowledge, from proficiency, as a concept of language use. We discuss ways in which language dominance may be assessed, with a focus on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU).…

Two studies of children's conversational language abilities are reported. In the first, mean length of utterance (MLU) and lexical diversity (D) were examined in a group of typically developing Cantonese-speaking children in Hong Kong. Regression analyses indicated a significant linear relationship between MLU and age (R = .44) and a significant…

The present study assesses the phonological development of 17 children acquiring Finnish at the developmental point of 25 words (ages 1;2-2;0). The analysis is made using the "PHONOLOGICAL MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE" (PMLU) method (Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002), which focuses on the children's whole-word productions. Two…

The current paper reports of language production in 15 Hebrew-speaking boys, aged 9;0-13;0, with fully methylated, non-mosaic fragile X syndrome and no concomitant diagnosis of autism. Contrary to expectations, seven children were non-verbal. Language production in the verbal children was studied in free conversations and in context-bound speech.…

Background: Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. Aims: To develop a systematic method for the analysis of language samples in Quebec French, and to provide preliminary normative data on early lexical and syntactic…

Results of two experiments investigating phonological skills of illiterate, unschooled adults and formerly illiterate, unschooled adults from shantytowns in Portugal suggest that learning to read, though not strictly necessary, plays a decisive role in the development of the ability of many individuals to focus on phonological length of…