During acquisition, children must learn both the meanings of words and how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier "some" and its pragmatically enriched meaning: 'some but not all'. Some studies have shown that 'scalar implicature' -- that "some" implies…

Purpose: This retrospective study aimed to amass large data sets to enable statistical comparisons of communication outcomes for infants receiving cochlear implants (CIs) before 9 months of age compared to groups who received their first CI between 9 months and 3.5 years of age. Method: Speech perception scores and experienced clinicians'…

Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months…

Many studies suggest that detecting statistical regularities in linguistic input plays a key role in language acquisition. Although statistical learning is not necessarily implicit in nature, it is often defined as learning that happens without awareness. This article investigates whether statistical learning in young children is indeed implicit,…

This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants' performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to…

There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on…

The study of language acquisition has a long and contentious history: researchers disagree on what drives this process, the relevant data, and the interesting questions. Here, I outline the Starting Big approach to language learning, which emphasizes the role of multiword units in language, and of coarse-to-fine processes in learning. I outline…

Children learn words in environments where there is considerable variability, both in terms of the number of possible referents for novel words, and the availability of cues to support word-referent mappings. How caregivers adapt their gestural cues to referential uncertainty has not yet been explored. We tested a computational model of…

Parents play an important role in creating home language environments that promote language development. A nonequivalent group design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a community-based implementation of LENA Start™, a parent-training program aimed at increasing the quantity of adult words (AWC) and conversational turns (CT). Parent-child…

This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations…

Persistent inequalities in the education of multilingual students make the effective integration of content and language instruction an urgent issue for theory and practice. This article contributes to the literature on content and language integration by exploring empirically the relationship between teacher learning and changes in teacher…

Purpose: This article's aim is to discuss the potential of audio description (AD) in two contexts: (1) developmental and educational difficulties experienced by children with low vision or total blindness; (2) psycho-social importance of access to mass media by children and adolescents. Method: The considerations presented here are formed on the…

In this study, we examined story circles to understand how the small-group activity supports and shapes the storytelling of young students in multicultural, multilingual preschool classrooms. Through a representative example, we show how language development unfolds in the context of a transcultural and translanguaging dialogic exchange of…

Studies of the acquisition of verbs tend to focus on one-verb predicates of the prevalent English type. But in hundreds of languages around the world, multi-verb predicates like serial verb constructions are widely used. It could be reasoned that children should begin producing simple, single-verb predicates before they are able to produce…

Causatives have received considerable attention in first language acquisition. Of Mayan languages, acquisition of the causative has only been investigated for K'iche' and Tzotzil, based on longitudinal and spontaneous data. K'iche'-speaking children do not acquire morphological causatives until the age of 3 years, while children acquiring Tzotzil…