Children with Down syndrome (DS) have cognitive disabilities resulting from trisomy 21. Language-learning difficulties, especially expressive language problems, are an important component of the phenotype of this population. Many individuals with DS are born into bilingual environments. To date, however, there is almost no information available…

Background: Previous studies in the literature report that deaf individuals who experience late access to language perform poorly on false belief tests of Theory of Mind (ToM) compared with age-matched deaf and hearing controls exposed to language early. Methods: A group of 22 deaf Nicaraguans (aged 7 to 39 years) who learned Nicaraguan Sign…

This paper examines what children believe about unmapped number words--those number words whose exact meanings children have not yet learned. In Study one, 31 children (ages 2-10 to 4-2) judged that the application of "five" and "six" changes when numerosity changes, although they did not know that equal sets must have the same number word. In…

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. "Cognition," 87, 151-178], we provided cross-linguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument…

Alexander Graham Bell is often portrayed as either hero or villain of deaf individuals and the Deaf community. His writings, however, indicate that he was neither, and was not as clearly definite in his beliefs about language as is often supposed. The following two articles, reprinted from The Educator (1898), Vol. V, pp. 3?4 and pp. 38?44,…

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in prelinguistic vocal production during the first 20 months of life. Vocalizations were classified into 23 mutually exclusive and exhaustive types, and grouped into five ascending levels using the Stark Assessment of Early Vocal Development-Revised (SAEVD-R). Data from 30 typically developing…

In two experiments, the use of mutual exclusivity in the naming of whole objects was examined in monolingual and bilingual 3- and 6-year-olds. Once an object has a known name, then via principles of mutual exclusivity it is often assumed that a new name given to the object must refer to some part, substance, or other property of the object.…

Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the…

This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration…

This is a study of the lexical and grammatical abilities of 16 lexically precocious talkers. These children, aged 2;0 were compared to their age-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;0, and their expressive vocabulary-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;6. Individual differences in children's lexical knowledge at 2;0 were stable -- evident…

Children are able to take multiple perspectives in talking about entities and events. But the nature of children's sensitivities to the complex patterns of perspective-taking in adult language is unknown. We examine perspective-taking in four- and six-year-old Tamil-speaking children describing placement events, as reflected in the use of a…

The study investigates a social-pragmatic expectation that may motivate children to search their environment when asked for the referent of a novel label. In one experimental phase, the experimenter presented 40 two-year-olds a bucket containing a novel object and another visible object--either familiar or novel. The experimenter either asked…

This essay by Truscott and Sharwood-Smith is a valiant attempt with a laudable goal. It seeks to show how different perspectives and disciplines can capture what is happening in acquisition and notably in L2 acquisition. Nonetheless, I think that the results are much closer to an elaborated grammatical theory than an elaborated processing theory…

Previous research has shown that children as young as 2 can learn words from 3rd-party conversations (Akhtar, Jipson, & Callanan, 2001). The focus of this study was to determine whether younger infants could learn a new word through overhearing. Novel object labels were introduced to 18-month-old infants in 1 of 2 conditions: directly by an…

This study examined the capacity of text-based online chat to promote learners' noticing of their problematic language productions and of the interactional feedback from their interlocutors. In this study, twelve ESL learners formed six mixed-proficiency dyads. The same dyads worked on two spot-the-difference tasks, one via online chat and the…