Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have persistent language difficulties in complex syntax. To date, few studies have examined the effectiveness of syntactic training focusing on complex grammar, with no existing studies having been done in French. In English, the SHAPE CODING (SC) system, which combines shapes and colors…

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies…

Purpose: Despite the considerable scientific interest in researching the reading skills of the deaf population, most of these studies focus on reading comprehension (RC) at the word or sentence level. Such reading activates different underlying language processes than text-level reading, which is more akin to real-life reading literacy. The…

During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

This study investigated the comprehension of prosodically and syntactically marked focus by 5- to 8-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children listened to question-answer dialogues while looking at pictures depicting the scenarios, and judged whether the answers were correct responses to the…

How do children infer the meaning of a novel verb? One prominent proposal is that children rely on syntactic information in the linguistic context, a phenomenon known as "syntactic bootstrapping". For example, given the sentence "The bunny is gorping the duck," a child could use knowledge of English syntactic roles to infer…

In addition to deficits in pragmatics, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have weaknesses in complex syntax and working memory (WM). These two deficits may be closely related. Previous work investigated the effects of WM training in developmental language disorders and showed significant improvement in both WM and syntax. The current…

Based on the bilingual children's and adults' code-switching (CS) dependency treebanks, this paper investigates the syntactic features and pragmatic functions of the Chinese-English bilingual children's CS and compares them with bilingual adults'. It is mainly found that (1) As to the bilingual children, the mixed sentences present the longest…

Purpose: The current study examines bilingual children's development of Spanish and English morphosyntax structures over the period of 1 year. Identification of morphosyntax forms clustered by difficulty can elucidate their development and guide clinicians to select appropriate targets for intervention and monitoring. Specifically, we aim to…

This case study describes the use of a syntax intervention with two deaf children who did not acquire a complete first language (L1) from birth. It looks specifically at their ability to produce subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure in American Sign Language (ASL) after receiving intervention. This was an exploratory case study in which…

Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek-Italian bilingual children (8-11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using…

The purpose of this study was to compare the types of morphological and syntactic errors in written simple and complex sentences produced by children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with typical language (TL). We analyzed the writing products of 30 children with DLD and 33 children with TL for morphological (e.g., past…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the feasibility of the delivery of complex syntax recast therapy via telepractice to Spanish-English bilingual children and provide preliminary evidence of the efficacy of this approach. Method: Fifteen bilingual children with developmental language disorders were stratified based on language…

This article presents a developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The literature thus far indicates that the pathway of development involves first producing only…

Children who speak non-standardized language varieties are at risk for both over- and under-referral to speech-language and special education services (e.g., Morgan et al., 2016; Pearson et al., 2014). Extensive research with bidialectal (Craig, 2016; Kohn et al., 2021) and bilingual (Goldstein, 2022; Paradis et al., 2021) children has shown the…