As linguistic diversity continues to increase in the United States public school system, schools are expected to meet the needs of their ever-changing student body. While much attention within education research has understandably focused on multilingual learners' (MLs) English language acquisition, an emergent body of work points to science as an…

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…

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children's later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present…

This volume presents research on second language learning through audiovisual input, conducted within the SUBTiLL (Subtitles in Language Learning) project at the University of Barcelona. It includes studies exploring various language dimensions and skills, such as vocabulary, pronunciation, and reading, while also considering learner factors, such…

This study examined the trajectories of the multi-word constructions (MWCs) in 98 advanced second language (L2) learners during their first-year at an English-medium university in a non-English-speaking country, using linear mixed-effects modelling, over one academic year. In addition, this study traced the academic reading input that L2 learners…

Research on monolingual children has shown that listening comprehension is predicted by a range of language and cognitive skills; less is known about predictors of listening comprehension in bilingual children and about the role of language input. This study presents longitudinal data on predictors of English listening comprehension in 100…

Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of…

Learning to walk allows infants to travel faster and farther and explore more of their environments. In turn, walking may have a cascading effect on infants' communication and subsequent responses from caregivers. We tested for an "inflection point"--a dramatic shift in the developmental progression--in infant communication and caregiver…

The present study investigated the role of morphosyntactic information in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verb argument structures (VAS) in the Japanese language, which allows massive omissions of arguments and case markers. In particular, we investigated how the 'variation sets' proposed by Küntay and Slobin work in Japanese.…

Native speakers of English have a strong preference for transferred negation as opposed to non-transferred negation. The present study aims to examine whether young Chinese-speaking ESL learners have a target-like preference for transferred negation and whether they have a system-wide representation of transferred negation in their early English…

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at…

While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

This study examined early Hebrew verb acquisition, highlighting CDS-CS relations across inflectional and derivational verb learning. It was carried out on a corpus of longitudinal dense dyadic interactions of two Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1;8-2;2 and their parents. Findings revealed correlated patterns within and between CDS and CS corpora in…