The goal of this study is to investigate the acquisition of causal relations with parce que "because" and temporal relations with quand "when" by children between age 3 and 5. We aim at identifying whether different discourse type, conversation and narration, allow children to use quand and parce que with different semantic…

Aspect markers (AMs), temporal adverbs (TAs) and temporal nouns (TNs) are used by young Mandarin-speaking children to express time. However, the factors that affect the relative acquisition trajectories of these categories remains unclear. Accordingly, this study adopts Weist's time-concept model to examine the patterns of acquisition between and…

Background: Difficulties in language development are related to social and emotional problems, lower academic outcomes, and lower quality of life from childhood to adolescence. These grave consequences might be significantly reduced by timely identification and professional support. The introduction of systematic screening for language delay (LD)…

This book gives an overview of the linguistic development of Korean-English bilingual children living in the US. It provides a detailed longitudinal account of English and Korean acquisition in early childhood, offering a close examination of Korean-American children's code-switching and morphology and syntax development during a time when their…

Data from elicited language tasks can add to the literature on the development of the complex syntax structures of embedded complement clauses in typically developing children. In the current study, preschool-age children (n = 27) participated in two elicited language tasks focusing on three types of embedded complement clauses: infinitival…

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…

Polish and English differ in the surface realization of the underlying Determiner Phrase (DP): Polish lacks an article system, whereas English makes use of articles for both grammatical and pragmatic reasons. This difference has an impact on how referentiality is rendered in both languages. In this article, the authors investigate the use of…

Irish is a rapidly changing minority language spoken as the main community language in some areas of the officially Irish-speaking "Gaeltacht" regions in Ireland. We analyse narratives from 17 parent-child dyads, living in one such area. All children, aged 3-6;4, had high exposure to the local variety of Irish. The input quality was…

Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…

Purpose: This study describes the language diversity (the within-group variability in dual-language skills) of a sample of Latino dual-language learners (preschoolers, 3-5 years of age) and how language diversity is related to home and classroom factors. Method: A sample of 161 caregivers and their preschoolers participated in this study.…

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…

This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…

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…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

Mothers' provision of utterances with internal state words has been shown to influence infants' acquisition of internal state vocabulary and has been proposed to foster preschoolers' theory of mind development. In this article the authors examine maternal internal state speech during free play with infants at 13, 17, and 21 months. The study…