Purpose: The finite verb morphology composite (FVMC) is a valid measure for charting children's tense development and for differentiating children with and without language impairment during preschool and early elementary years. However, it is unclear whether FVMC scores vary as a function of language sample elicitation contexts. The current study…

The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their…

Purpose: Though the frequency of gesture use by infants has been related to the development of different language abilities in the initial stages of language acquisition, less is known about whether this frequency (or "gesture rate") continues to correlate with language measures in later stages of language acquisition, or whether the…

Tender Shoots is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) for parents aimed at improving preschool children's oral language skills relevant for later reading. Parents of 72 preschool children (M = 50 months) were randomly assigned to either a Rich Reading and Reminiscing (RRR) condition, a Strengthening Sound Sensitivity (SSS) condition, or an…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input--including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input--affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who…

Studies examining productive syntax have used varying elicitation methods and have tended to focus on either young children or adolescents/adults, so we lack an account of syntactic development throughout middle childhood. We describe here the results of an analysis of clause complexity in narratives produced by 354 speakers aged from four years…

This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina "et al.," 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider…

This longitudinal study examined the development of narrative micro- and macrostructure in Japanese-English bilingual returnee children. Returnees are children of immigrant families who move to a foreign country, spending a significant portion of their formative developmental years in the foreign majority language context before returning to their…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

This article reports results from a longitudinal study from age 4 to 7 of comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish monolingual children (N = 17). "Baby Birds/Baby Goats" from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) were used to elicit narratives and ask comprehension questions at age…

The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98…

Data from 27 subjects--children acquiring Swedish as their first language (L1), adult immigrants acquiring Swedish as their second language (L2), and adult Swedish controls--were used to investigate narrative structure in child L1 and adults L2. Narratives were elicited through a picture story task. (30 references) (Author/JP)