The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statistical learning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53 independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of…

The current study examined early grammatical marking in a relatively understudied language, Mandarin, by using the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Two waves of data collection included 338 monolingual children (17-36 months; 143 female) at Time 1 and 308 children (32-55 months; 139 female) at Time 2 and…

Current models of the affinity between syntax and vocabulary are complex and recognize the contribution of bootstrapping and computational processes. To date, the mutual facilitation between these two constructs over time has not been studied in second language (L2) school children. The present study investigated longitudinally the direction and…

Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task,…

When threatened with ostracism, children attempt to strengthen social relationships by engaging in affiliative behaviors such as imitation. We investigated whether an experience of ostracism influenced the extent to which children imitated a partner's language use. In two experiments, 7- to 12-year-old children either experienced ostracism or did…

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on…

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong)…

Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language. One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies--relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase, or sentence. These dependencies often involve…

Does the language we speak affect the way we think, and if so, how? Previous researchers have considered this question by exploring the cognitive abilities of speakers of different languages. In the present study, we looked for evidence of linguistic relativity within a language and within participants by looking at memory recall for monolingual…

Research has demonstrated that children use different strategies to infer a referent. One of these strategies is to use inflectional morphology. We present evidence that toddlers learning Spanish are capable of using gender word inflections to infer word reference. Thirty-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Participants…

Gesture is an important precursor of children's early language development, for example, in the transition to multiword speech and as a predictor of later language abilities. However, it is unclear whether gestural input can influence children's comprehension of complex grammatical constructions. In Study 1, 3- (M = 3 years 5 months) and…

Research on preschoolers' selective learning has mostly been conducted in English-speaking countries. We compared the performance of Turkish preschoolers (who are exposed to a language with evidential markers), Chinese preschoolers (known to be advanced in executive skills), and English preschoolers on an extended selective trust task (N = 144).…

Is language governed by formal rules or by analogy to stored exemplars? The acquisition of the English past tense has long played a central role in this debate. In the present study, children rated the acceptability of a regular and an irregular past-tense form of each of 40 novel verbs (e.g., "fleeped", "flept") using a…

To explore how online speech processing efficiency relates to vocabulary growth in the 2nd year, the authors longitudinally observed 59 English-learning children at 15, 18, 21, and 25 months as they looked at pictures while listening to speech naming one of the pictures. The time course of eye movements in response to speech revealed significant…