This study investigates the development of metapragmatic awareness in preschool children through the lens of Talmy's Force-Dynamics Model. Using conversation data from 60 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4 to 6, obtained from the International Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), the research employs a custom coding framework to analyze…

"Physical development is the window to the whole child. Through watching children move, they reveal their true selves." This groundbreaking book bridges the gap between theory and practice, offering a deeper understanding of young children's physical development in outdoor environments. It explores the specific phases of motor…

Children and young people living in care (aka looked-after children and young people) are at a high risk of language development delays. This scoping review aimed to identify and synthesise research published between 1989 and 2024 that examines the prevalence, nature and key areas of language difficulties among children and young people in care.…

In the area of early language development, understanding links between screen media, vocabulary, and grammar in 5-year-old children is crucial yet complex. While previous studies have exposed a negative association between screen use and vocabulary, the roles of content and context remain less explored, especially within the Swedish context. This…

Background: At the beginning of the 21st century, international adoptions of children with cleft lip and/or palate increased dramatically in Sweden. Many children arrived partially or totally unoperated, despite being at an age when palatoplasty has usually been performed. To date, the speech development of internationally adopted (IA) children…

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group.…

Some studies have concluded that sign language hinders spoken language development for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children even though sign language exposure could protect DHH children from experiencing language deprivation. Furthermore, this research has rarely considered the bilingualism of children learning a signed and a spoken language.…

The association between decontextualized talk (DT; i.e., talk extending beyond immediate context) and child language outcomes is well-attested but not well-understood. This study tested the hypothesis that DT is more linguistically complex than contextualized talk (CT). Thirty-eight Norwegian children (M[subscript age] = 5.5 years; 25 girls; 30…

What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We…

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children's vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens…

Background: Between 90% and 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who often need support with how to adapt their communication. Parent-child interaction (PCI) is an important predictor of deaf children's future language development. It is therefore necessary for professionals to assess parents' strengths and needs to identify areas for…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to (a) provide evidence for a theoretical model of between-language interaction in bilingual phonological production through the examination of substitution error patterns and to (b) provide developmental data on bilingual children with and without speech sound impairments for use in clinical assessment and…

Purpose: Many models of language comprehension assume that listeners predict the continuation of an incoming linguistic stimulus immediately after its onset, based on only partial linguistic and contextual information. Their related developmental models try to determine which cues (e.g., semantic or morphosyntactic) trigger such prediction, and to…

Person-referring pronouns in the first and second person (I, your) have been viewed as signs of increasing social understanding in children due to their shifting reference properties. However, they are linguistically complex elements and might depend on general language development. We used longitudinal transcript data from Manchester corpus (12…