The optimal age in FLL (foreign language learning) for children has been discussed over 50 years but there is no satisfactory conclusion for us. However, the notion "the younger, the better" in FLL has a big market in the world. As a result, the distorted hypothesis is being spread widely as a true and complete theory. Specifically…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

In six analyses using the Child Language Data Exchange System known as CHILDES, we explored whether and how parents and their 1.5- to 5-year-old children talk about writing. Parent speech might include information about the similarity between print and speech and about the difference between writing and drawing. Parents could convey similarity…

Objective: To examine the effects of early maternal and paternal depression on child expressive language at age 24 months and the role that parent-to-child reading may play in this pathway. Participants and methods: The 9-month and 24-month waves from a national prospective study of children and their families, the Early Childhood Longitudinal…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…

This article reviews research on speech and language abilities in people with cri du chat syndrome (CCS). CCS is a rare genetic disorder, with an estimated incidence between 1 in 15,000 and 1 in 50,000 births, resulting from a deletion on the short arm of chromosome 5. In general, individuals have delayed speech and language development, and some…

In order to examine whether children adjust their phonetic speech categories, children of two age groups, five-year-olds and eight-year-olds, were exposed to a video of a face saying /aba/ or /ada/ accompanied by an auditory ambiguous speech sound halfway between /b/ and /d/. The effect of exposure to these audiovisual stimuli was measured on…

Little research has been conducted on the development of suprasegmental characteristics of vocalizations in typically developing infants (TDI) and the role of audition in the development of these characteristics. The purpose of the present study was to examine the longitudinal development of fundamental frequency (F[subscript 0]) in eight TDI and…

The study tested the effect of three factors on Arab children's (N = 256) phoneme isolation: "phoneme's linguistic affiliation" (standard phonemes vs. spoken phonemes), phoneme position (initial vs. final), and linguistic context (singleton vs. cluster). Two groups of children speaking two different vernaculars were tested. The two vernaculars…

The present study explores word boundary behaviours in the spontaneous speech of a group of 6 preschool children. Speech collected in play settings is examined for the presence of normal and atypical connected speech behaviours, and to identify specific instances of open and close word juncture behaviours. The findings suggest that developmental…

This paper is concerned with a specific case of L3 acquisition: the starting position for English vowel acquisition by infant German-Italian bilinguals will be investigated in light of prototype theory. The chosen example of triple language contact is characterised by consecutive bilingualism as the basis of L3 acquisition, where the learners' L2…

This paper reports the design and trial of an original Observational Framework for quantitative investigation of young children's responses to adult language in their typical language learning environments. The Framework permits recording of both the response expectation of the adult utterances, and the degree of compliance in the child's…

Responds to a critique of an earlier article. Reexamines the pattern of inversion and universion in Adam's (1973) wh-question data and argues that the Role and Reference grammar explanation put forth cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the effects of contextual demands on French-speaking children's spontaneous production of cleft sentences. The study shows that French children frequently produce cleft formulations when they contrast their own belief or knowledge with that of their addressee and when the matter of the disagreement concerns the agent of the action. (CB)