This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech ("Elephant said that he gets the football"), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we…

There is considerable evidence that high-quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is associated with children's language competence. Yet, studies in contexts of universal access to quality-regulated ECEC are rarer, exacerbating concerns over selection bias endemic to non-experimental work on the topic. Extending the cumulative knowledge…

This study examined (a) the relationship between gesture and speech produced by children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children, and their mothers, during shared book-reading, and (b) the potential effectiveness of gestures accompanying maternal speech on the conversational responsiveness of children.…

Children's talk about the mind has been scarcely studied in non-English speakers. For this reason, this longitudinal study documents age-related changes in German-speaking children's internal state language. At 24, 30 and 36?months, children were administered general language tests and their internal state vocabulary levels were obtained via…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to compare vocabulary size, lexical composition, and late talking in large samples of Korean and U.S. children ages 18-35 months. Method: Data for 2,191 Korean children (211 children recruited "offline" through preschools, and 1,980 recruited "online" via the Internet) and 274 U.S.…

This paper presents a model of syntax acquisition, whose main points are as follows: Syntax is acquired in an item-based manner; early learning facilitates subsequent learning--as evidenced by the accelerating rate of new verbs entering a given structure; and mastery of syntactic knowledge is typically achieved through practice--as evidenced by…

Presents the Lexical/Semantic Hypothesis, which proposes that early learning is more lexically oriented, and that early word combinations can be explained by more semantically oriented accounts than the Full Competence Hypothesis. The article also replaces the Grammatical Infinitive Hypothesis with the Modal Hypothesis. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Results of a survey of 200 parents attending baby and child clinics in North Wales show that parents know less about language development than about other areas of child development. Results suggest that both monolingual and bilingual parents and their children would benefit from improved information on how to facilitate language development. (43…

Addresses phenomena exhibited by young children such as suffixed and free articles, double definiteness, genitives, pronouns, and "nominal style." Shows that analysis of these early data must invoke at least one functional projection above the noun phrase. Findings argue against any claim about the universal absence of functional…

Explores one aspect of the possible relationship between speech perception and the awareness of linguistically relevant sound patterns in the first years of word reading. No evidence emerged of a concurrent association between children's skills in labelling speech sounds at the beginning of words and their phonological awareness of either rhyme or…