Oral language is the primary means through which a child controls, describes, organises, and evaluates their life experiences and their ability to use oral language which effectively impacts their future literacy development. Currently, the world is awash with dynamic change and constant disruption. These include natural disasters such as the…

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…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

As part of an intervention project to encourage exploratory talk with young children in mathematics, it was found that, although the children did not engage fully in reasoning, the intervention had supported some children in developing more cohesive discourse. The cohesion was evidenced through the children's use of deictic words, in particular…

When communicating with their interlocutors, adults have a robust preference to order previously mentioned ("old") referents in the discourse before mentioning referents that have not yet been introduced in the discourse ("new"). But in an experimental study investigating phrasal conjuncts, 3- to 5-year-olds acquiring German…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

Four different kinds of story were presented to children aged 4,7, and 10 years and to adults. In the stories, the relationship between basic-level referents mentioned in the first part of the story and the related superordinates mentioned in the second part was changed by means of different kinds of articles introducing the superordinates:…

Using transcripts of children's talk, this paper examines the validity of claims that children provided with opportunities to work cooperatively and collaboratively in small groups will use talk to help them make meaning and enhance their cognitive understanding. The claims are substantiated. (Contains 32 references.) (Author/LB)

A study investigated how children report epistemic modality and focused on two main questions: (1) How do children reproduce modal devices that are present in the original (to-be-reported) discourse? and (2) How do children use different linguistic means of quotation--direct, indirect, or other--in this situation? Sixty monolingual French-speaking…

Recent studies have suggested that cultures vary in subtle ways in the talk about talk that children hear and learn to produce. Twenty-two three-year-old children and their families in respectively Oslo, Norway and Cambridge, Massachusetts were observed during mealtime with the aim of identifying talk-focused talk. The analysis distinguished talk…

A study of second language acquisition focuses on the transition from formulaic to creative speech patterns. Subjects were two native Japanese-speaking children, aged 4 and 8, learning English as a Second Language in New York, observed over a period of 2 years. The nature of formulaic speech is discussed, drawing from research on such speech and…

A study designed to examine the variation that occurs in the request production of children between the ages of 6 and 7 observed the kind of requests children make, what they request, whom they ask, and how they formulate their ideas. Twenty native French-speaking children divided into two age groups (6- and 7-year-olds) were asked to complete two…

In a study of young children's use of conjunction in narrative discourse, different types of discourse were collected from 34 preschool children: visually prompted stories, stories told without visual stimuli, responses to questions about the prompted stories, explanations of a game, and responses in interviews. The discourse was analyzed for the…

Investigates the reintroduction of referents in the "Frog Stories" told by Italian children, aged 4-10 (n=100). The study confirms that elementary school children are more competent than preschoolers in integrating the semantic content of the current utterance into the context generated by previous discourse.(Author/JL)