Language is conventional because word meanings are shared among different people. The present study examined Chinese infants' understanding of the language convention that different people should generalize words in the same way. Thirteen-month-old Mandarin-speaking Chinese infants repeatedly viewed a speaker providing a novel label for a target…

The present study investigates the relation between language environment and language delay in 63 British-English speaking children (19 typical talkers (TT), 22 late talkers (LT), and 22 late bloomers (LB) aged 13 to 18 months. Families audio recorded daily routines and marked the new words their child produced over a period of 6 months. To…

Research Findings: This study examines the frequency of reasoning talk used by 56 educators during their naturally occurring play interactions with infants in their early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers. Using Hasan's semantic framework, reasons were coded as social (based on social rules) or logical (based on rules of nature). The…

Previous event-related potential (ERP) work has indicated that the neural processing of action sequences develops with age. Although adults and 9-month-olds use a semantic processing system, perceiving actions activates attentional processes in 7-month-olds. However, presenting a sequence of action context, action execution and action conclusion…

This study investigated the manner in which 56 infant educators used language to direct the behaviour of infants (defined as children aged birth to two years), on the basis that the ways in which educators frame their commands represent an important component of young children's learning experiences. Underpinned by systemic functional linguistic…

The growth rate and the composition of expressive lexicon was studied in a sample of 903 infants between the age of 0;8 and 1;4 whose parents completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory-Words and Gestures. As expected, older children had on average larger vocabularies compared to younger children.…

Evidence for the role of corrective input as a facilitator of language acquisition is inconclusive. Studies show links between corrective input and grammatical use of some, but not other, language structures. The present study examined relationships between corrective parental input and children's errors in the acquisition of the Spanish copula…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

Speech directed towards young children ("motherese") is subject to consistent systematic modifications. Recent research suggests that gesture directed towards young children is similarly modified (gesturese). It has been suggested that gesturese supports speech, therefore scaffolding communicative development (the facilitative…

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words.…

Sampled the speech of American, French, and Swedish mothers to their one-year olds, to analyze distribution of phonetic parameters of adult speech, as well as children's own early words. Found that variability is greater in child words than in adult speech, and mother-child dyads showed no evidence of specific maternal influence on phonetics of…