In this essay, we consider recent narratives in the science of brain development under poverty in relation to the older idea of the culture of poverty. We argue that in theorizing poor parenting and deficient linguistic stimulation as the primary pathways of influence through which poverty exerts its damaging effects on the brain, brain science…

Purpose: Difficulty with marking past tense verbs is a clinical indicator of language disorders. However, there is too little information on language development in bilingual children living in multilingual and multicultural countries like Singapore to accurately diagnose language disorders. In this study, we aimed to understand language…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to document speech sound development across early childhood from a dynamic assessment (DA) perspective that captures a breadth of linguistic environments using the Glaspey Dynamic Assessment of Phonology (Glaspey, 2019), as well as to provide normative data for speech-language pathologists to compare speech…

Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals' vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual (n = 170) and trilingual (n = 20) toddlers aged 17-33 months growing up in a bilingual community where…

The Yucatec Maya language has a highly complex deictic system with interesting typological differences that in addition to demonstratives and locative adverbs also includes ostensive evidentials and modal adverbs. Given that deictic words are among the first that children produce, the aim of this study is to identify the early acquisition that…

This article reviews pretend play and its impact on and association with children's language. Studies have shown the significant relationship between the two domains; however, more intervention research needs conducting to validate the causal impact of pretend play. Nevertheless, several studies exploring its effects on early language reported…

The purpose of the study was to examine word learning in preschool children from families who differed in socioeconomic status (SES). Preschool children (N = 58) were assigned to SES groups based on maternal education and completed a dynamic assessment of explicit word learning 2 times. At the first administration, no SES-group differences were…

This paper draws on 3 years of ethnographic research with young children and their families in a northern English town, employing a more-than-human lens to pay attention to what, beyond humans, might be involved in the emergence of children's literacies. The paper focuses on the role of the body and place in the emergence of young children's…

This study compared mental state language (talk about emotions, thoughts, intentions, etc.) used by 6- to 11-year-old children with Down syndrome (DS) to a younger typically developing (TD) comparison group matched by nonverbal cognition. We aimed to determine (1) whether mental state language use is delayed in DS relative to developmental…

Here I shall write about the late Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) and contextualize this important philosopher's work with respect to the concrete, everyday pedagogical issue of language learning. To demonstrate Stiegler's applicability to education studies, I shall address the issue of character amnesia ([Chinese characters omitted], tibiwangzi in…

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in…

Purpose: Although autistic perspectives are paramount for evidence-based practice and the neurodiversity paradigm, they are often underrepresented in research and have only recently started to get attention from professionals in different fields, including communication sciences and disorders (CSD) and foreign language teaching (FLT). To alleviate…

In everyday life, children hear but also often see their caregiver talking. Children build on this correspondence to resolve auditory uncertainties and decipher words from the speech input. As they hear the name of an object, 18- to 30-month-olds form a representation that permits word recognition in either the auditory (i.e. acoustic form of the…

Through analysis of the language, this study aimed to investigate the current practice of using songs in public library storytimes. Language interactions in 68 storytime programs involving 652 child participants were observed and transcribed. Then, textual analysis was conducted to examine the language of singing songs, focusing on how language…

Developmental difference is a common characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with unclear sex differences. The current study included 610 children with ASD, aged between 2 and 7 years, with completed language profiles. We used a nonparametric item response theory model called Mokken scale analysis to examine the order of acquisition of…