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Lina Hashoul-Essa; Sharon Armon-Lotem – First Language, 2025
Research suggests that girls acquire language faster than boys, with gender differences most pronounced in vocabulary acquisition during early childhood. This study examines the role of gender in the acquisition of vocabulary and morphosyntax in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children aged 18 to 36 months. Using the Palestinian Arabic Communicative…
Descriptors: Arabic, Gender Differences, Morphology (Languages), Syntax
Mélanie Havy – First Language, 2024
In everyday life, children hear but also often see their caregiver talking. Children build on this correspondence to resolve auditory uncertainties and decipher words from the speech input. As they hear the name of an object, 18- to 30-month-olds form a representation that permits word recognition in either the auditory (i.e. acoustic form of the…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Infants, French, Language Acquisition
Tinatin Tchintcharauli; Nino Tsintsadze; Teona Damenia; Tamar Kalkhitashvili; Nino Doborjginidze; Sigal Uziel-Karl – First Language, 2024
This article explores the applicability of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a language assessment measure for Georgian child language, as to-date, Georgian, a morphologically rich language with numerous inflectional categories, experiences an extensive lack of instruments for early language assessment. To this end, a set of guidelines for…
Descriptors: Guidelines, Oral Language, Language Acquisition, Turkic Languages
Pedro Mateo Pedro – First Language, 2024
This article evaluates the acquisition of directionals in Q'anjob'al, a Western Mayan language of Guatemala. The data come from a longitudinal study of two Q'anjob'al monolingual children of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala: Xhuw (1;9-2;5) and Xhim (2;3-3;5). The results show how these children acquire the morphological distribution of…
Descriptors: American Indian Languages, Native Language, Language Acquisition, Verbs
Krista Byers-Heinlein; Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero; Esther Schott; Hilary Killam – First Language, 2024
Vocabulary size is a crucial early indicator of language development, for both monolingual and bilingual children. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because they learn words in two languages, and there remains significant controversy about how to best measure their vocabulary size, especially in relation to monolinguals. This…
Descriptors: Infants, Toddlers, French, English Language Learners
Jean Quigley; Elizabeth Nixon – First Language, 2024
Children's speech is influenced by the speech they hear, in particular by the parental speech addressed directly to them. The aim of this study was to analyse toddlers' speech with their parents and to investigate the influence of specific characteristics of child-directed speech on child speech in real time during mother-child and father-child…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Toddlers, Adults, Intelligence Tests
Nyberg, Sandra; Rudner, Mary; Mattila, Peter; Heimann, Mikael – First Language, 2021
Mind-mindedness (MM), the parent's propensity to treat their young child as an individual with a mind of their own, has repeatedly been found to be positively associated with subsequent child development outcomes. In the current Swedish study, the first aim was to investigate the main features of MM in this cultural context and the second aim was…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Infants, Language Acquisition, Parent Child Relationship
Anna Gavarró; Alejandra Keidel – First Language, 2024
This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they…
Descriptors: Grammar, Syntax, Infants, Preschool Children
Hila Gendler-Shalev; Rama Novogrodsky – First Language, 2024
Toddlers with smaller vocabulary than expected for their age are considered late talkers (LT). This study explored the effects of characteristics of words on vocabulary acquisition of 12- to 24-month-old LT children compared with an age matched (AM) and a vocabulary matched (VM) group of typically developing peers. Using the…
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Phonology, Hebrew, Language Skills
Nylund, Annette; Korpilahti, Pirjo; Kaljonen, Anne; Rautakoski, Pirkko – First Language, 2023
In a changing society where the roles of fathers and mothers in caregiving are becoming more equal, the role of the father in early language development has also changed. We aimed to study associations between paternal factors and early vocabulary development in boys and girls. In a longitudinal cohort study, we examined the growth of expressive…
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Infants, Mothers, Fathers
Chen Zhao; Ludovica Serratrice; Elena Lieven; Circle Steele; Nivedita Malik; Yi An; Emily Hayden; Jo Neumegen; Thea Cameron-Faulkner – First Language, 2024
Language development can be framed as the process of learning how to mean (Halliday, 1975). From this perspective, the role of communicative function is central to the language-learning process with development being guided by interaction with experienced others. In the current study, we present a detailed analysis of the communicative functions…
Descriptors: Infants, Language Acquisition, Child Development, Socialization
Wang, Luchang; Kager, René; Wong, Patrick C. M. – First Language, 2022
The acoustic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been widely studied, but whether and how young learners' language development benefits from individual properties remains to be confirmed. This study investigated whether toddlers' word processing was affected by tone hyperarticulation in the IDS of a tone language. Nineteen- and…
Descriptors: Toddlers, Intonation, Word Recognition, Task Analysis
Perucchini, Paola; Bello, Arianna; Presaghi, Fabio; Aureli, Tiziana – First Language, 2021
The goal of this intensive longitudinal study was to trace the developmental trajectories of infant pointing production, through consideration of the modality (i.e. pointing alone vs pointing-vocal coupling) and the communicative intention (i.e. imperative vs declarative). Multilevel analysis was used to model the normative trend and the…
Descriptors: Infants, Nonverbal Communication, Longitudinal Studies, Child Development
Krishnan, Gayathri G.; Raghunathan, Arathi; Sarma, Vaijayanthi M. – First Language, 2023
In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9-2;10 and 2;3-3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Grammar, Language Acquisition, Morphemes
Singh, Leher; Cheng, Qiqi – First Language, 2023
Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the phonetic forms of words change based on surrounding context. Here, we investigate the effects of a common source of phonetic change--phonological…
Descriptors: Phonology, Language Acquisition, Second Language Learning, Bilingualism