Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global and local aspects of lexical diversity in three…

Background: Previous studies have explored the size and word type composition (nouns, predicates, etc.) of expressive vocabularies of preschool children with Down syndrome, both spoken and signed. Separately, overall preferences for modality of expression have also been explored. Aims: To extend previous findings by describing the relationships…

Research on "parentese," the acoustically exaggerated, slower, and higher-pitched speech directed toward infants, has mostly focused on maternal contributions, although it has long been known that fathers also produce parentese. Given recent societal changes in family dynamics, it is necessary to revise these mother-centered models of…

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input…

Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENA[TM] measures, age and publication type…

Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research has examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken lexical use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous…

Children learn what words mean from hearing words used across a variety of contexts. Understanding how different contextual distributions relate to the words young children say is critical because context robustly affects basic learning and memory processes. This study examined children's everyday experiences using naturalistic video recordings to…

English is undoubtedly an important language for educational and socio-economic mobility in numerous countries including Malaysia. Regardless of its importance, studies to document English language acquisition among Malaysian children acquiring English in the local context remain scarce. This normative data is imperative for syllabus-designers,…

Research investigating the effect of study abroad on the development of grammatical accuracy has produced conflicting results. Using corpus linguistics research methods--yet to be used more extensively in SLA research--this study investigated students' acquisition of grammatical accuracy and lexical development during study abroad in China on data…

Whether to use spoken English for the instruction of American Sign Language (ASL) is a pedagogical debate for those teaching hearing second language learners. Previous investigations have found the use of learners' first language to be beneficial for vocabulary acquisition. Studies on sign languages, however, have found that a class taught…

This study examines the quantity and quality of child-directed speech across household activities in a socioeconomically diverse sample of Argentinian Spanish-speaking children, an understudied population. Thirty children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours. The middle two hours were transcribed and analysed…

While semantic and syntactic properties of verb meaning can impact the success of verb learning at a single age, developmental changes in how these factors influence acquisition are largely unexplored. We ask whether the impact of syntactic and semantic properties on verb vocabulary development varies with age and language ability for toddlers…

Phonological selectivity is a phenomenon where children preselect which target words they attempt to produce. The present study examines selectivity in the acquisition of complex onsets and codas in English, and specifically in the acquisition of biconsonantal (CC) clusters in each position compared to triconsonantal (CCC) clusters. The data come…

This paper examined to what extent causal explanation speaking tasks (CESTs) are cognitively appropriate for assessing young language learners' (YLLs) L2 speaking. Ninety-six YLLs (48 from Grade 4 and 6 each) in China performed two CESTs in both L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English). They also completed receptive and productive L2 vocabulary size tests.…

This study investigates whether the earliest words children choose to say are mainly words containing sounds they can produce (cf. 'phonological dominance' hypotheses), or whether children choose words without regard to their phonological characteristics (cf. 'lexical dominance' hypotheses). Phonological properties of words in spontaneous speech…