Clinical Question: For young AAE speakers (P), how useful is the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) compared with Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in the presence of African American English (AAE)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: PsycInfo®, Education Source, Education Resources…

In a body of empirical research, it has been observed that young children from across different linguistic communities adhered to a particular type of nonadult interpretation of disjunction: They appear to interpret disjunction conjunctively. Through three experiments with Japanese-speaking preschoolers, we investigate the source of this nonadult…

The article, "morphosyntactic peculiarities of the speech of children with Down's syndrome", treats, important aspects of the study of two adjacent branches of linguistics, namely, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics-Language development of the child accompanied by speech disorders, on the other hand, those morphosyntactic features…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

This study investigated whether we can find reliable comprehension-to-production syntactic priming effects in children aged 2;0 to 2;11 and how phonological working memory and sentence production skills relate to the syntactic priming process. A finding of reliable syntactic priming effects would provide strong evidence that children's syntactic…

In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading)…

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) show delays in Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Complement sentences such as "Eliane says that Santa Clause exists" influence ToM performance. Can a training program targeting sentential complements enhance ToM? Twenty-one French-speaking DHH children (M[subscript age] = 8 years 11 months)…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine changes in English and Spanish morphosyntactic standardized scores over time in bilingual children. Method: One hundred bilingual children participated in this longitudinal study. The average age of the children at the beginning of the study was 5;11 (years; months). A subset of the participants was identified…

Few studies provide information on the reliability and validity of parental report instruments when assessing the language skills of pre-school-aged children. This study investigates the internal consistency and concurrent validity of the parental report instrument, the Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory III (FinCDI III),…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…

Children acquire argument structure through distributional evidence, but how does this interacts with event semantics and existing verb knowledge? The current study compares verb learning in adult speakers of Japanese (where lexical causatives span wider semantic categories) and English (where alternation is more restricted). In the Fully…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…

In this study, we explored the role of emerging inhibitory control skills in language acquisition in 62 typically developing children aged 24-32 months and investigated whether early inhibitory control skills are longitudinally associated with language outcome. Specifically, we focused on two different inhibitory processes that develop…

Purpose: Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on…