Limited language experience in childhood is common among deaf individuals, which prior research has shown to lead to low levels of language processing. Although basic structures such as word order have been found to be resilient to conditions of sparse language input in early life, whether they are robust to conditions of extreme language delay is…

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that typically developing children have difficulties comprehending non-canonical structures. These findings have been interpreted within the Relativized Minimality (RM) approach, according to which local relations cannot be established between two terms of a dependency if an intervening element possesses similar…

Child gender has been proved to affect toddlers'/children's language development in several studies, but its effect was not found to be stable across different ages or various aspects of language ability. The effect of gender on toddler's, children's and adolescents' language ability was examined in the present meta-analysis of ten Slovenian…

This article describes the development of new scales for assessing the status of a young child's language comprehension and production. Items and sections on the scales were included to reflect advances in research on language acquisition and impairment. The New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (NRDLS) were trialled on 301 children and then…

Parents and caregivers can maximize children's engagement with educational television programming by co-viewing and discussing concepts and issues during and following episodes, and parents and caregivers can poach ideas and processes from these programs and apply them to their own interactions with children. School librarians might also consider…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate consistent comprehension problems. The present study investigated whether these problems are driven primarily by structural complexity or length. A picture-sentence matching task was presented to 30 children: (1) 10 children with SLI, (2) 10 comprehension-matched children with typical…

In an experiment investigating aspects of children's comprehension of sentences containing the connective "if," young children judged correct and reversed "Y if X" and "If X, Y" sentences as "sensible" or "silly." The comprehension of the role of "if" in sentences appears to be a…

Research in the active-passive verb relation has indicated that there is an interaction between syntactic form and verb semantics among children of preschool age. The present study examines the contribution of active-passive syntax and verb semantics to comprehension difficulty for preschoolers, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and adults. An additional…

Indicates a difference between animate/inanimate subjects and objects in reversible sentences. Suggests that animatedness may be an important variable in children's early comprehension of speech, and that the traditional definition of reversibility should be modified to clarify the effects of probability and animatedness. (Author/RL)

Reports two experiments examining the abilities of normal children ages five to seven years and deaf-mute children ages 11 to 18 years in tasks demanding comprehension, production, and imitation of passive-voice and double-negative sentences. (Author/RH)

This study assessed the effectiveness of 5 hours of training on 3-year-old children's comprehension and production of the passive, negative, possessive, and negative passive syntactic structures. A comprehension test identified 20 children who did not evidence understanding of these structures. Subjects were then randomly assigned to experimental…

This article discusses a study designed to ascertain the comprehension of the role of "because" in a sentence in children between the ages of 5;8 and 10;11. (CFM)

Preschool children were tested on their comprehension of the comparatives, "taller,""shorter,""more," and "less" in five types of sentences. Results suggest that many children can understand two-dimensional comparisons, but perform poorly on second-clause subjects pronoun sentences because of uncertainty about the referent of the pronoun. (SDH)

This report summarizes two years of research by a team at the University of Austin, aimed at developing and testing a model of sentence comprehension. The general model that has guided the work maintains that, on the basis of cues available in a sentence's surface form, the hearer projects hypotheses about the grammatical relations and semantic…