Background: The language of the science curriculum is complex, even in the early grades. To communicate their scientific observations, children must produce complex syntax, particularly complement clauses (e.g., "I think it will float;" "We noticed that it vibrates"). Complex syntax is often challenging for children with…

Purpose: The present article reports on the implementation and results of a randomized intervention trial targeting the literate language skills of prekindergarten children without identified language disorders but with low oral language skills. Method: Children (N = 82; 45 boys and 37 girls) were screened-in and randomized to a business-as-usual…

Young children learning English are biased to attend to the shape of solid rigid objects when learning novel names. This study seeks further understanding of the processes that support this behavior by examining a previous finding that three-year-old children are also biased to generalize novel names for objects made from deformable materials by…

Spanish-speaking (SS) children with language impairment (LI) present with deficits in morphology and verb argument structure. These language areas may be useful for clinical identification of affected children. This study aimed to evaluate the discrimination accuracy of spontaneous language measures with SS preschoolers to tease out what…

Research in diachronic linguistics has shown that homonyms are often dispreferred in language. This study proposes that this trend is mirrored in the difficulties that children encounter in mapping homonyms. Two experiments are presented in support of this proposition. In Experiment 1, 16 preschool children (mean age = 4;6) are shown to perform…

In Study 1, English-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds heard a novel adjective used to label one of two objects and were asked for the referent of a different novel adjective. Children were more likely to select the unlabeled object if the two adjectives appeared prenominally (e.g., "a very DAXY dog") than as predicates (e.g., "a dog that is very DAXY").…