Purpose: This longitudinal study assessed continuity and stability of productive language (vocabulary and grammar) and discourse features (turn-taking; asking and responding to questions) during mother-child play. Method: Parent-child language use in 119 Spanish-speaking, Mexican immigrant mothers and their children at two ages (M = 2.5 and 3.6…

Almost every upper- and middle-class family in Saudi Arabia has a foreign housemaid who does the housework and takes care of the children. This study aims to find out whether foreign housemaids have an impact on children's acquisition of Arabic, the children's first language. Surveys with 300 mothers with children under the age of six revealed…

Maternal input influences language development in children with Down syndrome (DS) and typical development (TD). Telegraphic input, or simplified input violating English grammatical rules, is controversial in speech-language pathology, yet no research to date has investigated whether mothers of children with DS use telegraphic input. This study…

Many children learn language, in part, from the speech of non-native speakers who vary in their language proficiency. To investigate the influence of speaker proficiency on the quality of child-directed speech, 29 mothers who were native English speakers and 31 mothers who were native speakers of Spanish and who reported speaking English to their…

When talking to infants, adults, especially mothers, espouse a particular type of speech known as Infant-directed Speech (IDS) or "babytalk" or "babytalking" , which contains a set of specialized speech with simplified grammatical construction; more repetitive; and more grammatical than adult-directed speech. Specifically, this…

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…

The present study determined whether parenting style, defined by control strategies varying in power-assertion mediated the established relation between maternal language usage (grammar and semantics) and child language (grammar, semantics and pragmatics) during toddlerhood (n = 60). Based upon their use of control strategies mothers were…

This study investigated the use of generic noun phrases by preschool children and their mothers. Results indicate striking differences in the way generics and non-generics are distributed in the speech of both groups, suggesting generic noun phrases differ in their semantics and conceptual organization from non-generics and may reflect children's…

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…