This study explored the effects of a child's gender and school setting on preschoolers' language abilities (receptive vocabulary), creativity, and social play. The participants were primarily European-American children who spoke English as a primary language (nine children were bilingual), and were from middle income socioeconomic backgrounds.…

In this article, I first take on the issue of standards and the degree to which they do or do not contribute to the improvement of language and literacy outcomes for children in multilingual societies. Then I consider the relation of standards to language and, finally, raise the vexed issue of content knowledge and its relation to standards, on…

This study tested whether bilingual children show a lag in semantic development (the schematic-categorical shift) relative to monolingual children due to smaller vocabularies within a language. Twenty French-English bilingual and twenty English monolingual children (seven to ten years old) participated in a picture-naming task in English. Their…

Gaining facility with spelling is an important part of becoming a good writer. Here we review recent work on how children learn to spell in alphabetic writing systems. Statistical learning plays an important role in this process. Young children learn about some of the salient graphic characteristics of written texts and attempt to reproduce these…

The purpose of this study was to compare early speech and language development of children with and without cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) in the US and Slovakia from 6 to 24 months of age. Thirty-two children from the US (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) and Slovakia (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) participated in this study. The children…

Competency in society's lingua franca plays a major role in the emergence of social disparities within education. Therefore, the present longitudinal study investigates vocabulary development and its predictors in preschool years. We focus on whether internal (phonological working memory) and external variables (preschool and home learning…

This study examines semantic development in 60 Spanish-English bilingual children, ages 7 years 3 months to 9 years 11 months, who differed orthogonally in age (younger, older) and language experience (higher English experience [HEE], higher Spanish experience [HSE]). Children produced 3 associations to 12 pairs of translation equivalents. Older…

Medical contexts provide a rich opportunity to study important theoretical questions in cognitive development and to investigate the influence of a range of interacting factors relating to the child, the experience, and the broader social context on children's cognition. In the context of examples of research investigating these issues, we…

This study is a systematic analysis of the information content of a wide range of distributional cues to word boundaries, individually and in combination, in naturally occurring child-directed speech across three languages (English, Polish, and Turkish). The paper presents a series of statistical analyses examining the relative predictive strength…

Highly abstract predicates (e.g. "think") present a number of difficulties for language learners (Gleitman et al., 2005). A partial solution to learning these verbs is that learners exploit regularities in the syntactic frames in which these verbs occur. While agreeing with this general approach to learning verbs, we caution that this…

Children with significant hearing loss may experience great difficulty developing spoken language and literacy skills to a level commensurate with children of the same age with typical hearing. While studies of children who use cochlear implants show improved spoken language outcomes in some cases, when compared to the same children's earlier use…

A central issue in second language acquisition (SLA) research is the relationship between morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic knowledge among L2 learners. It has been proposed that, L2 language acquisition starts with transfer of L1 semantic and morphosyntactic processing strategies; however, it has been observed that, at lower proficiency…

The present research focuses on the possible relation between observing responses and language acquisition. In the first of three experiments, preschool aged participants with and without disabilities were presented with the opportunity to observe multiple aspects of a stimulus. A Naming experience was created in which the stimulus was presented…

This paper seeks to examine the role of the official and "de facto" languages of anglophone Caribbean islands such as Jamaica. In reflecting on their statuses as users of language, tertiary level students registered in a Year One Performing Arts Program provided much insights into the interplay of both languages that coexist in society…

This dissertation addresses the broad question about how phonology and phonetics are interrelated, specifically how phonetic language changes, which gradually alter the phonetics of speech sounds, affect the phonological system of the language, and vice versa. Some questions I address are: (i) What aspects of speakers' knowledge of their language…