Research has described several features shared between musical rhythm and speech or language, and experimental studies consistently show associations between performance on tasks in the two domains as well as impaired rhythm processing in children with language disorders. Motivated by these results, in the current study our first aim was to…

Each language has its unique way to mark grammatical information such as gender, number and tense. For example, English marks number and tense/aspect information with morphological suffixes (e.g., -"s" or -"ed"). These morphological suffixes are crucial for language acquisition as they are the basic building blocks of syntax,…

Children with language learning difficulties frequently display problems learning grammar. One such group is children with Down syndrome. This study evaluates the effectiveness of an intervention to teach the use of the regular simple past tense to children with Down syndrome. Trained teaching assistants delivered the intervention for 20 min per…

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

Developmental psychology plays a central role in shaping evidence-based best practices for prelingually deaf children. The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis (Conway et al., 2009) asserts that a lack of auditory stimulation in deaf children leads to impoverished implicit sequence learning abilities, measured via an artificial grammar learning (AGL)…

Previous studies of individual differences have revealed strong correlations between children's vocabulary and grammatical abilities, and these data have been used to support theoretical accounts positing direct developmental relations between these two areas of language. However, between-person differences do not necessarily reflect…

Bilingual children experience more variation in their language environment than monolingual children and this impacts their rate of language development with respect to monolinguals. How long it takes for bilingual children learning English as a second language (L2) to display similar abilities to monolingual age-peers has been estimated to be 4-6…

Sentence repetition tasks are widely used in the diagnosis and assessment of children with language difficulties. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of sentence repetition tasks and their relationship to other language skills. We present the results from a 2-year longitudinal study of 216 children. Children were assessed on measures of…

This study considered a relation between rhythm perception skills and individual differences in phonological awareness and grammar abilities, which are two language skills crucial for academic achievement. Twenty-five typically developing 6-year-old children were given standardized assessments of rhythm perception, phonological awareness,…

Extracting general rules from specific examples is important, as we must face the same challenge displayed in various formats. Previous studies have found that bimodal presentation of grammar-like rules (e.g. ABA) enhanced 5-month-olds' capacity to acquire a rule that infants failed to learn when the rule was presented with visual presentation of…

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g. Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage…

Every environment contains infinite potential features and correlations among features, or patterns. Detecting valid and learnable patterns in one environment is beneficial for learners because doing so lends predictability to new environments where the same or analogous patterns recur. However, some apparent correlations among features reflect…

In adults, native language phonology has strong perceptual effects. Previous work has shown that Japanese speakers, unlike French speakers, break up illegal sequences of consonants with illusory vowels: they report hearing "abna" as "abuna". To study the development of phonological grammar, we compared Japanese and French infants in a…

The acquisition of the function of case-marking is a key step in the development of sentence processing for German-speaking children since case-marking reveals the relations between sentential arguments. In this study, we investigated the development of the processing of case-marking and argument structures in children at 3, 4;6 and 6 years of…

Mintz (2003 ) described a distributional environment called a frame, defined as the co-occurrence of two context words with one intervening target word. Analyses of English child-directed speech showed that words that fell within any frequently occurring frame consistently belonged to the same grammatical category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective,…