Having heard "a pimwit", English-speakers assume that "the pimwit" is also possible. This type of productivity is attributed to syntactic categories such as NOUN and DETERMINER, but the key question is "how" do humans become endowed with these categories in the first place. We propose a novel approach that combines…

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…

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children's later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine…

This meta-analysis examined associations between the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input and children's language. Pooled effect size for quality (i.e., vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity; k = 35; N = 1,958; r = .33) was more robust than for quantity (i.e., number of words/tokens/utterances; k = 33; N = 1,411; r = .20) of…

Mental state terms are believed to be closely related to the development of Theory of Mind (ToM). This study focuses on mental state verbs (MSVs) and investigates how they are used by Japanese-speaking mother-child dyads compared to their English-speaking counterparts. Analyses of their spontaneous speech from the CHILDES archives show that…

Background: Despite studies of how parent-child interactions relate to early child language development, few have examined the continued contribution of parenting to more complex language skills through the preschool years. The current study explored how positive and negative parenting behaviours relate to growth in complex syntax learning from…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

When "again" modifies an English goal-PP construction, the sentence is ambiguous between a repetitive and a restitutive reading. Interestingly, languages vary in whether their counterpart to English "again" permits a restitutive reading with goal-PP constructions (Beck 2005; Beck & Snyder 2001). This article explores how…

Background: Late language emergence is a risk indicator for developmental language disorder. Parent-implemented early language intervention programmes (parent programmes) have been shown to have positive effects on children's receptive and expressive language skills. However, long-term effectiveness has rarely been studied. Additionally, little is…

We compare the predictions of two different accounts of first language acquisition by investigating the relative contributions of abstract syntax and input frequency to the elicited production of main and embedded questions by 36 monolingual English-speaking toddlers aged 3;00 to 5;11. In particular, we investigate whether children's accuracy…

The current study examined academic language (AL) input of mothers and teachers to 15 monolingual Dutch and 15 bilingual Turkish-Dutch 4- to 6-year-old children and its relationships with the children's language development. At two times, shared book reading was videotaped and analyzed for academic features: lexical diversity, syntactic…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

This study investigated the motion event language children and their parents engaged in while playing a board game. Children are sensitive to differences in manner and path at infancy, yet adult-like motion event expression appears relatively late in development. While multiple studies have examined how exposure to parent speech generally relates…

Six tests of the spontaneous speech of twenty-one English-speaking children (1 ; 10 to 2 ; 8; MLUs 1[middle dot]53 to 4[middle dot]38) demonstrate the presence of the syntactic category determiner from the start of combinatorial speech, supporting nativist accounts. Children use multiple determiners before a noun to the same extent as their…

The present longitudinal study examines the role of caregiver speech in language development, especially syntactic development, using 47 parent-child pairs of diverse SES background from 14 to 46 months. We assess the diversity (variety) of words and syntactic structures produced by caregivers and children. We use lagged correlations to examine…