Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…

To reveal the formation process of speech processing with early hearing experiences, we tracked the development of functional connectivity in the auditory and language-related cortical areas of 84 (36 female) congenitally deafened toddlers using repeated functional near-infrared spectroscopy for up to 36 months post cochlear implantation (CI).…

In spoken languages, children acquire locative terms in a cross-linguistically stable order. Terms similar in meaning to in and on emerge earlier than those similar to "front" and "behind," followed by "left" and "right." This order has been attributed to the complexity of the relations expressed by…

Research has indicated that school aged (6-16 years) versions of cognitive assessment instruments have varying levels of linguistic demand, which could impact assessment results for placement purposes. However, a significant limitation to this research is the fact that it has not been replicated with cognitive assessment instruments used in…

Reduced forms such as the pronoun "he" provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as "the lead singer of Coldplay." Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity…

Various forms of humor are an important aspect of social interactions, even at an early age. Humor comprehension is a repertoire that is said to emerge between the ages of 7 and 11 years, and this is primarily attributed to a child's level of cognitive development. The behavioral literature has suggested that various forms of complex verbal…

A good deal of research purports that bilingualism has a positive effect on some aspects of cognitive functioning. However, this effect is not consistent, and little research examines trajectories of cognitive skill development in bilingual children. Moreover, it remains unclear whether different types of bilingualism impact how cognitive…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

Educational societies encountered rapid development in all fields of knowledge, assisted by the invention of new technologies and development of linguistic systems. Over time, researchers contribute to design well known instructional models such as traditional-based and inquiry-based models. However, the previous literature investigations showed…

This study examined associations between caregiver talk and language skills in full term (FT) and preterm (PT) children (n = 97). All-day recordings of caregiver-child interactions revealed striking similarities in amount of caregiver talk heard by FT and PT children. Children who heard more caregiver talk at 16 months demonstrated better…

Most theories of learning would predict a gradual acquisition and refinement of skills as learning progresses, and while some highlight exponential growth, this fails to explain why natural cognitive development typically progresses in stages. Models that do span multiple developmental stages typically have parameters to "switch" between…

Developmental theory has long emphasized the importance of linking perception, cognition, and action. Techniques designed to record the spatial and temporal characteristics of hand movements (i.e., "manual dynamics") present new opportunities to study the nature of these links across development by providing a window into how perceptual,…

Purpose: When learning novel word forms, preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as "specific language impairment") produce speech targets inaccurately and with a high degree of intraword variability. The aim of the current study is to specify whether and how layering lexical-semantic information onto novel…

When young children interpret novel nouns, they tend to be very much affected by the perceptual features of the referent objects, especially shape. This article investigates whether children might inhibit a prepotent tendency to base novel nouns on the shape of referent objects in order to base them on conceptual features (i.e. taxonomic object…