Children's early word productions often differ from the target form, sometimes exhibiting vowel lengthening when word-final coda consonants are omitted (e.g., "dog" /d[open o]g/ [arrow right] [d[open o]:]). It has typically been assumed that such lengthening compensates for a missing prosodic unit (a mora). However, this study raises the…

Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumental case--which could not be due to innate knowledge. Thirty Polish-speaking children aged 2; 6…

Young children learning English are biased to attend to the shape of solid rigid objects when learning novel names. This study seeks further understanding of the processes that support this behavior by examining a previous finding that three-year-old children are also biased to generalize novel names for objects made from deformable materials by…

LChildren pass through a stage in development when they produce utterances that contain auxiliary BE ("he's playing") and utterances where auxiliary BE is omitted ("he playing"). One explanation that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is the presence of questions in the input that model S-V word order (Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello,…

The present study investigated the roles of pattern detection capacities and understanding of intentions in children's learning of linguistic rules. We taught two-year-olds a Hebrew morphological distinction between noun and verb forms using two different training protocols. The protocols were identical in all parameters except that only in an…

This study compared the use of English past tense in a group of Spanish-English bilingual children with language impairment (BLI) to younger groups of bilinguals with typical and atypical language development reported in an earlier study. Ten children with BLI enrolled in 3rd-6th grade participated. Children supplied 12 regular, 12 irregular, and…

To assess the effectiveness of providing training in elaborative, emotion rich reminiscing (emotional reminiscing, ER) as an adjunct to Parent Management Training (PMT) for parents of children (N = 38, M age = 56.9, SD = 15.8 months) with oppositional behaviors. "Control" parents received PMT and non-language adjunct intervention, child-directed…

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that…

Major innovations are becoming available for research in language development and disorders. Among these innovations, recent tools allow naturalistic recording in children's homes and automated analysis to facilitate representative sampling. This study employed all-day recordings during the 2nd year of life in a child exposed to three languages,…

Talk between students and their teachers is central to learning at school, yet students' competence is often understood as the outcome of instructional talk rather than essential to successful participation in instructional talk. Curriculum frameworks used to attribute students with levels of competence reflect these understandings. This article…

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other…

The objectives were to explore the often reported noun advantage in children's language acquisition using a picture naming paradigm and to explore the variables that affect picture naming performance. Participants in Experiment 1 were aged three and five years, and in Experiment 2, five years. The stimuli were action and object pictures. In…

The current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found.…

Parents and child care personnel in English-dominant parts of the world often express misgivings about raising children bilingually. Their concerns are based on the belief that dual language learning during the infant-toddler stage confuses children, delays their development, and perhaps even results in reduced language competence. In this…

We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children's online interpretation of…