This paper explores whether there is evidence for age and/or input effects in child L2 acquisition across three different linguistic domains, namely morphosyntax, vocabulary, and syntax-semantics. More specifically, it compares data from English-speaking children whose age of onset to L2 Dutch was between one and three years with data from…

This article re-examines the classroom discourse context in early years settings and primary schools. It seeks to understand why such slow progress has been made in developing talk for learning in recent years. The article acknowledges that children are already expert language users by the time they start school and offers practitioners practical…

Diversity of key consonants used in communication (DKCC) is a value-added predictor of expressive language growth in initially preverbal children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Studying the predictors of DKCC growth in young children with ASD might inform treatment of this under-studied aspect of prelinguistic development. Eighty-seven…

Asset-based community development (ABCD) is a promising practice for communities to engage in self-determination through the efforts residents invest in identifying community assets, framing and documenting the issues communities face, and taking action to advance quality of life. The ABCD literature does not report on the application of ABCD…

This article presents a study of preschool-aged children's knowledge of the semantics of the negative polarity item (NPI) "any". NPIs like "any" differ in distribution from non-polarity-sensitive indefinites like "a": "Any" is restricted to downward-entailing linguistic environments (Fauconnier 1975, 1979;…

For more than 20 years, the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) and its adaptations for languages other than English have been used as reliable measures of infants' and toddlers' early receptive and productive vocabulary size. This article introduces the OZI, the Australian English adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI, now…

The natural musicality so often present in children's singing can begin to fade as the focus of a lesson shifts to the process of reading and writing conventional notation symbols. Approaching the study of music from a linguistic perspective preserves the pace and flow that is inherent in spoken language and song. SongWorks teaching practices…

Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., "the dog chased the cat"). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., "that's the dog that chased…

Responding to the need to prepare elementary teachers for the increasing linguistic diversity in schools, this book presents key foundational principles in language and literacy development for linguistically diverse students. Readers see these ideas enacted through the journeys of real students as they progress from 1st through 6th grade. What…

Postsecondary English language education is a growing field in the United States. While there has been considerable research on international student mobility in higher education, there is limited research on the population's participation in U.S. English language programs (ELPs). This study examined literature in related fields to create a…

The informativity of a computational model of language acquisition is directly related to how closely it approximates the actual acquisition task, sometimes referred to as the model's "cognitive plausibility." We suggest that though every computational model necessarily idealizes the modeled task, an informative language acquisition…

In foreign language classrooms we often find that, in addition to their mother tongue (L1), learners already speak--or are learning--at least one other language. As a result, they already have an array of linguistic and cognitive skills that may prove very useful if they are adequately exploited during the language learning process. However, in…

Purpose: A large body of literature has indicated vowel space area expansion in infant-directed (ID) speech compared with adult-directed (AD) speech, which may promote language acquisition. The current study tested whether this expansion occurs in storybook speech read to infants at various points during their first 2 years of life. Method: In 2…

Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophical orientation concerning dialogism offers a challenge to contemporary play theory. This study demonstrates the benefits of a Bakhtinian analysis of double voicing in early childhood programs. Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, specifically Bakhtin's ideas on genre and utterance, has received less attention in the analysis…

To test between two recent accounts of the early stages in the acquisition of negation, we conducted an elicited production study with 25 children, between 2;05 and 3;04 (mean 2;11). The experimental study produced a robust set of negative sentences, with considerable individual variation. Although 13 of the child participants mainly produced…