Children employ multiple cues to identify the referent of a novel word. Novel words are often embedded in sentences and children have been shown to use syntactic cues to differentiate between types of words (adjective vs. nouns) and between types of nouns (count vs. mass nouns). In this study, we show that children learning Malay (N = 67), a…

This study examined dual language learners' (DLLs n = 24) and English-only (EO n = 20) children's expressive and receptive language in kindergarten (M[subscript age] = 5.7 years) as well as the relation to peers' language use. Expressive language skills (vocabulary diversity, syntactic complexity) were measured in the fall, winter, and spring…

Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in--"subcategorization frames"--to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant…

Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

A sample of 80 first- and second-grade children selected to represent four levels of reading competence were tested in their recognition of semantic, syntactic, and lexical change in sentences previously decoded during prose reading. (JMB)