Three experiments investigated the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g., "may", "have to"). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of weak epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (e.g., "The toy may be…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate whether children with receptive-expressive language delay (R/ELD) and expressive-only language delay (ELD) differ in their use of gesture; to examine relationships between their use of gesture, symbolic comprehension, and language; to consider implications for assessment and for the nature of…

This is the first study of a large sample of Bulgarian-speaking toddlers and their communicative development. A Bulgarian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory Words and Sentences was used to obtain parent report data on 153 children between the ages of 20 and 30 months. Lexical and grammatical development were…

Increased recognition of the role of the body and environment in cognition has taken place in recent decades in the form of new theories of embodied and extended cognition. The growing use of ever more sophisticated computer-generated 3D virtual worlds and avatars has added a new dimension to these theories of cognition. Both developments provide…

Sign language comprehension requires visual attention to the linguistic signal and visual attention to referents in the surrounding world, whereas these processes are divided between the auditory and visual modalities for spoken language comprehension. Additionally, the age-onset of first language acquisition and the quality and quantity of…

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

Numerous theories of development position infants as inherently driven to make sense of the world around them, and the acquisition of language is a fundamental developmental milestone of this period. The purpose of this study was to document the first year of implementation of a Spanish/English dual language program in an infant classroom, using a…

We examined the home-based concerns reported by mothers of infant siblings of children with autism across the first year of life. At all three ages measured, mothers of high-risk infants were significantly more likely than mothers of low-risk infants to report language, social communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior concerns but were…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given…

Music teachers may integrate a variety of English language arts content standards into their curriculum to enhance students' music experiences while also supporting their language development. John M. Feierabend and Melanie Champagne's picture book adaptation of "My Aunt Came Back" lends itself to multiple singing and discussion…

The early skills of Emergent Literacy include the knowledge and abilities related to the alphabet, phonological awareness, symbolic representation, and communication. However, existing models of emergent literacy focus on discrete skills and miss the perspective of the surrounding environment. Early literacy skills, including their relationship to…

Attention to social stimuli is associated with language development, and arousal is associated with the increased viewing of stimuli. We investigated whether skin conductance responses (SCRs) are associated with language development in autism spectrum disorder (ASD): a population that shows abnormalities in both attention to others and language…

Play helps children learn language, the authors claim, and they review the evidence for it. They suggest that play benefits children's language development because it incorporates many of the socially interactive and cognitive elements known to enhance language skills. Although much of this evidence proves correlational, they point to a…

Lexical competition that occurs as speech unfolds is a hallmark of adult oral language comprehension crucial to rapid incremental speech processing. This study used pause detection to examine whether lexical competition operates similarly at 7-8 years and tested variables that influence "online" lexical activity in adults. Children…