Background & aims: Throughout typical development, children prioritize different perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn words. The earliest acquired words are often those that are perceptually salient and highly imageable. Imageability, the ease in which a word evokes a mental image, is a strong predictor for word age of acquisition…

Vocabulary knowledge and speed of lexical access are early components of linguistic skill that co-develop rapidly in the first two years of life. Evidence suggests that these components are foundational for downstream linguistic and cognitive skills and that early individual differences set the stage for a developmental cascade throughout the…

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Children who rapidly recognize and interpret familiar words typically have accelerated lexical growth, providing indirect evidence that lexical processing efficiency (LPE) is related to word-learning ability. Here we directly tested whether children with better LPE are better able to learn novel words. In Experiment 1, 17- and 30-month-olds were…

Children learn words by listening to caregivers, and the quantity and quality of early language input predict later language development. Recent research suggests that word recognition efficiency may influence the relationship between input and vocabulary growth. We asked whether language input and lexical processing at 28-39 months predicted…

Objective: Identifying which preterm children (PT) are at increased risk for language and learning differences increases opportunities for participation in interventions that improve outcomes. Speed in spoken language comprehension at early stages of language development requires information processing skills that may form the foundation for later…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

In this study we explored factors that determine the knowledge of L2 words with orthographic neighbours in L1 (cognates and false cognates). We asked 150 Polish learners of English to translate 105 English non-cognate words, cognates, and false-cognates into Polish, and to assess the confidence of each translation. Confidence ratings allows us to…

The current study examined how morpho-semantic processing of derivational morphology develops from later childhood through adolescence to adulthood in Finnish. Finnish is a synthetic language rich both in derivation and inflection. It has been suggested that children gradually acquire the ability to process morphologically complex word structures.…

This established text--now revised and updated--reveals how spoken language skills are acquired and how they affect children's later reading and writing achievement. With a unique focus on the needs of educators, the book examines the foundations of language in the developing brain. It explores the relationship of language processes to core…

Background: There is wide variation in language abilities among young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), with some toddlers developing age-appropriate language while others remain minimally verbal after age 5. Conflicting findings exist regarding predictors of language outcomes in ASD and various methodological issues limit the…

To become successful communicators, children must be sensitive to the clarity/ambiguity of language. Significant gains in children's ability to detect communicative ambiguity occur during the early school-age years. However, little is known about the cognitive abilities that support this development. Relations between cognitive flexibility and…

This study examines the relationship between complex oral language and phonological awareness in the preschool years. Specifically, the authors investigate the relationship between concurrent measures of oral narrative structure (based on measures of both story retell and generation), and measures of blending and elision in a sample of 89 children…

Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as…

Although statistical learning and language have been assumed to be intertwined, this theoretical presupposition has rarely been tested empirically. The present study investigates the relationship between statistical learning and language using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework. Participants were administered…