Background: This study explores how family language policies (FLPs) in multilingual homes where isiXhosa is the primary language influence caregiver choices regarding children's language development and education. Objectives: The study aims to give insight on how non-nuclear family structures in a selected sample of Western Cape families are…

Numerous studies indicate that the language and literacy development of young children is highly contingent upon the construction of an enriching home literacy environment. Using sociocultural theory as a framework, in this article I explore how a bilingual child's language and literacy acquisition is embedded as a social practice within the home…

Purpose: The Arabic verb system features a nonlinear root and pattern derivational morphology. Previous studies suggest that young Arabic and Hebrew speakers' early verb use is based on semantic complexity rather than derivational morphological structure. The present study examines the role of morphological and semantic complexity in the emergence…

This study investigated phonological whole-word measures in bilingual Arabic-English speakers to explore how the target approximations influence children's phonological development. To this end, fifteen bilingual Arabic-English speakers and nine monolingual Arabic-speaking children aged 36-48 months (mean = 42) participated in a parent-child…

In this paper, the authors report the findings of a narrative review of extant international research literature to propose a conceptual model for how young children's language is entangled with place. Educational policy, curriculum documents, and speech and language therapy assessments in England tend to frame children as placeless and treat the…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

This article examines multilingual language use in two groups of children, one group at a state school, and one at a private IB school. The IB school has earlier been assumed to reflect an 'elite' multilingualism. Three research questions are posed: to what extent is the children's language use multilingual, what are their typological profiles,…

Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global and local aspects of lexical diversity in three…

The dynamic nature of multilingual families and their language policies has been touched upon by numerous studies. Adding to the field, the present study assesses the stability of family language policy in a standardised and quantitative manner. To this end, a linguistically heterogenous sample consisting of 488 multilingual families raising young…

Background: Rapid naming refers to the duration required to swiftly and accurately identify a set of familiar visual stimuli. Rapid naming serves as a significant indicator of the efficiency with which phonological information can be retrieved from memory, playing a crucial role in the advancement of language and literacy competencies. Aim: This…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

Young learners are known to extend verb regularity further than it actually is. When it happens, this children's overregularization phenomenon can be a result of several reasons: a failed linguistic development due to confusion between rules and memory, a lack of feedback from adults, and problems with cognitive development. The present study…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

This article explores the role of the reportative BIN in Yucatec Maya language acquisition and socialization among children aged 4 years and above, focusing on their interactions during pretend play. Building upon prior research on caregivers' strategic use of BIN, the study aims to elucidate the nuanced meanings and functions of the reportative…

This qualitative ethnographic research explores baby talk (BT) and ontology of infancy in a small, rural Indo-Fijian community via semistructured interviews with mothers about their children's language learning, mothers' narratives about their photographs of their young children engaged in everyday language, and audio- and video-recordings of…