Purpose: Complexity-based approaches to treatment have been gaining popularity in domains such as phonology and aphasia but have not yet been tested in child morphological acquisition. In this study, we examined whether beginning treatment with easier-to-inflect (easy first) or harder-to-inflect (hard first) verbs led to greater progress in the…

Background: Evidence suggests that language and social, emotional and behavioural (SEB) difficulties are associated in children and adolescents. When these associations emerge and whether they differ by language or SEB difficulty profile is unclear. This knowledge is crucial to guide prevention and intervention programmes for children with…

This study aimed at investigating the similarities and differences between Vygotsky's perspectives on child language development with nativism and behaviorism. Proposing the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky emphasized the role of collaborative interaction, scaffolding, and guided participation in language learning. Nativists, on…

Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age…

This study investigates the development of metalinguistic skills, particularly ambiguity detection, and whether training accelerates this development for prereaders in kindergarten (5;5-6;6). It is the first to compare homophone detection with lexically ambiguous sentence detection in which the same homophones appear. The experimental group…

The period covering the first 3 months of life consists of a series of pivotal, life-changing transitions for the infant, for the parents, and for the emerging parent-child relationship. The Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) system is a relationship-based tool that offers individualized information to parents about their baby's communication…

Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…

To achieve language proficiency, infants must find the building blocks of speech and master the rules governing their legal combinations. However, these problems are linked: words are also built according to rules. Here, we explored early morphosyntactic sensitivity by testing when and how infants could find either words or within-word structure…

Communication intervention in early life can significantly impact long-term outcomes for young children with autism. Parents can be vital resources in the midst of the current manpower shortage. "Map4speech" is a new mobile application developed for parents of children with autism spectrum disorder. It is specially designed to provide…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

This study investigated the quantity of audible and intelligible ('near and clear') educator talk directly experienced by under-two-year-old infants attending early childhood education and care (ECEC) programmes and examined whether the quantity of educator talk was related to characteristics of quality in their ECEC room. Participants were 57…

Speech and language therapists (SLT) frequently operate in an integrated manner, working with other professionals in the delivery of services to children. Since the end of the 1990s within the UK SLTs have developed integrated services within the field of public health. This study reports an evaluation of an integrated model of service delivery…

With the goal of developing culturally appropriate approaches for assessing and supporting children's language use, teachers of 4-to 6-year-old children in northern Canadian rural and Indigenous communities are involved in a 6-year collaborative action research project. Teachers video record children's interactions during dramatic and construction…

Researchers have consistently found a link between the quality of early parent-child book-reading interactions and children's language skill. Two aspects of quality (level of abstraction and utterance function) were examined simultaneously in the current study to further refine our understanding of how parents' talk during shared reading predicts…

This study aimed to test a 5-wave sequential mediation model linking maternal mind-mindedness during infancy to children's school readiness in kindergarten through a serial mediation involving child language and effortful control in toddlerhood and the preschool years. Among a sample of 204 mother-child dyads, we assessed maternal mind-mindedness…