The purpose of the current study was to examine effects of bilingual language input on infant word segmentation and on talker generalization. In the present study, monolingually and bilingually exposed infants were compared on their abilities to recognize familiarized words in speech and to maintain generalizable representations of familiarized…

Previous research on motion expression indicates that typological properties influence how speakers select and express information in discourse (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study further addresses this question by examining the expression of caused motion by adults and children (three to ten years) in French ("Verb-framed")…

Purpose: Analysis of narrative language samples is a recommended clinical practice in the assessment of children's language skills, but we know little about how results from such analyses relate to overall oral language ability across the early school years. We examined the relations between language sample metrics from a short narrative retell,…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

Children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) may experience barriers to communicative participation. Communicative participation is defined as 'participation in life situations in which knowledge, information, ideas or feelings are exchanged'. Barriers experienced in communicative participation cannot be explained by language competence…

What is the function of babbling in language learning? We examined the structure of parental speech as a function of contingency on infants' non-cry prelinguistic vocalizations. We analyzed several acoustic and linguistic measures of caregivers' speech. Contingent speech was less lexically diverse and shorter in utterance length than…

This study investigated the development of temporal adverbs in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of temporal adverbs indicating the past, present, and future were extracted from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children in four age groups: 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 5;6). Data analyses indicated: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of…

The motor speech disorder of dysarthria is present in a substantial number of children with cerebral palsy (CP), leading to speech intelligibility deficits, which may negatively affect the children's communication and quality of life. Few studies to date have examined strategies for increasing intelligibility in children with dysarthria, and most…

Lexical iconicity--signs or words that resemble their meaning--is overrepresented in children's early vocabularies. Embodied theories of language acquisition predict that symbols are more learnable when they are grounded in a child's firsthand experiences. As such, pantomimic iconic signs, which use the signer's body to represent a body, might be…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

This paper discusses the innovative research method of using body-worn cameras for capturing speech and experiences of 3- to 5-year olds in English early years settings. The strengths and weaknesses will be discussed in this multiple case study approach to capturing the quality of speech from young children (n = 43). Adopting an interactionist…

Research in the UK suggests that multi-componential interventions focusing on language and pre-literacy skills can improve children's reading and language skills. However, simple translations of such programmes may not produce equivalent effects in diverse communities. The reasons for this are multi-faceted and include factors beyond the rationale…

Purpose: Sentence diversity is a measure of early language development that has yet to be applied to individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The primary aim of this study was to identify whether children with ASD show change in sentence diversity over 6 months of treatment with Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI).…

This study explored associations between mothers' language teaching practices and children's language skills concurrently and longitudinally, while also taking into account the children's sex and mothers' education. Estonian mothers of 76 children reported their language teaching practices at child ages 3;0 and 4;0. Children's language…

Purpose: The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) is widely used to measure syntax production in young children. The goal of this article is to promote greater clarity and consistency in machine and hand scoring by presenting a revised version of the IPSyn (IPSyn-R) and comparing it with the original IPSyn (IPSyn-O). Method:…