These studies tested two questions about the developmental origins of children's sensitivity to iconicity with regard to number gestures: (1) whether children initially learn number gestures with sensitivity to the one-to-one correspondence between fingers and quantities or whether they learn them as unanalyzed symbols; and (2) whether sensitivity…

The general gender discourse has currently revealed gender gaps as early as at preschool age. To analyze developmental differences between boys and girls in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, n = 4,251 preschoolers aged 48-83 months were examined by means of the 'Dortmund Developmental Screening for Preschools 3-6' (DESK 3-6). Using the…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

We assessed 24-month-old infants' lexical processing efficiency for both novel and familiar words. Prior work documented that 19-month-olds successfully identify referents of familiar words (e.g., The dog is so little) as well as novel words whose meanings were informed only by the surrounding sentence (e.g., The vep is crying), but that the speed…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

The Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) cycle (teachers' initiation, students' response and teachers' feedback) has been a key focus in studies of second language classroom interaction and participation. This paper aims to examine the influence of the first language (L1) in the Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) cycle commonly appearing in…

Research on the home literacy environment has typically involved parents as teachers with little attention given to siblings' roles in teaching each other. This study examines naturalistic language and literacy teaching by 39 sibling dyads, at two timepoints, when children were ages 2 and 4 (time 1; T1) and again at ages 4 and 6 (time 2; T2). Each…

Children in Austria are exposed to a large amount of variation within the German language. Most children grow up with a local dialect, German standard language and 'intermediate' varieties summarized as 'Umgangssprache'. Using an ABX design, this study analyses when Austrian children are able to discriminate native varieties of their L1 German…

The aim of the study was to test whether proficient L2 users living in an L1-dominant environment would exhibit significant L2-L1 translation priming in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a semantic categorisation task (SCT). Only a few previous studies have found significant L2-L1 priming in LDT whereas significant results have often been…

The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /ae/ system (henceforth: PHL shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of phonotactic probability on sublexical (phonological) and lexical representations in 3-year-olds who had a history of being late talkers in comparison with their peers with typical language development. Method: Ten 3-year-olds who were late talkers and 10 age-matched typically…

Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching has received sustained attention from teachers and researchers for over thirty years. It is a well-established pedagogy that includes the following characteristics: major focus on authentic and real-world tasks, choice of linguistic resources by learners, and a clearly defined non-linguistic outcome. This…

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on…

Cross-linguistically, languages allow a wider variety of phonotactic patterns in onsets than in codas. However, the variability of phonotactic patterns in coda position in different languages suggests these patterns must, at least in part, be learned. Two experiments were conducted to explore whether there is an asymmetry in English-learning…

This article reports on two novel word-learning experiments examining children's use of subject animacy to categorize novel adjectives as either "tough" adjectives (e.g., "easy," "hard") or control adjectives ("afraid," "eager"). In Experiment 1, a group of 4- to 7-year-olds watched videos…