Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal "be"-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as "wh"-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children's performance on these passives can be affected by the verb's lexical…

The present studies sought to investigate the mapping relations between language and cognition by focusing on how Mandarin-speaking children acquire the mapping between their conceptual knowledge of possession and their linguistic expressions of possession. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 used a comprehension task to explore whether…

The competence in identifying and comprehending the meaning of idiomatic expressions developed at an early age. However, second language learners reach the comprehension skill differently within the age and at pace. There are many unresolved questions regarding the age which children start to comprehend L2 idioms. The objective of this study was…

School-aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real-time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better understand developmental changes in the neural processes engaged during language…

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in development when children start using more complex linguistic skills. In this study, we explore how children's ability to reflect on their degree of…

Purpose: Retrieval practice has been found to be a powerful strategy to enhance long-term retention of new information; however, the utility of retrieval practice when teaching young children new words is largely unknown, and even less is known for young children with language impairments. The current study examined the effect of 2 different…

We tested 12- and 18-month-old English-learning infants on a preferential-looking task which contrasted grammatically correct sentences using the determiner "the" vs. three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was substituted by another English function word, a nonsense word, or omitted. Our design involved strict controls…

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…

Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming…

In vision, typically-developing (TD) individuals perceive "global" (whole) before "local" (detailed) features, whereas individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit a local bias. However, auditory global-local distinctions are less clear in ASD, particularly in terms of age and attention effects. To these aims, here…

Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…

Adult humans process communicative interactions by recognizing that information is being communicated through speech (linguistic ability) and simultaneously evaluating how to respond appropriately (social-pragmatic ability). These abilities may originate in infancy. Infants understand how speech communicates in social interactions, helping them…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…