High-quality early childhood education is key for children's positive and long-term outcomes. Countries differ on how they quality assure provision. In England, Ofsted is the independent inspection body, often the source of controversy for lack of transparency in ratings. However, there is a dearth of evidence on how inspectors' judgements are…

In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important…

The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child's sentence final particle (SFP) "ba", in which we…

This article aims to investigate how Dutch children may eventually converge on a targetlike distribution of "hoeven" 'need,' a modal verbal NPI (Negative Polarity Item), based on its appearance in the scope of merely some but not all of its possible licensers in the language input (i.e., the induction problem). Imitation performance was…

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…