The study by Tamburelli, Jones, Gobet, and Pine (2012; henceforth TJGP) is a very welcome addition to the body of work concerning nonword repetition in typical development. TJGP go beyond previous work in considering three syllabic positions--onset, nucleus, and coda--with the aim of investigating how the positional role of phonemes within the…

The present acoustic-phonetic study explores whether voicing and devoicing assimilations of French fricatives are equivalent in magnitude and whether they operate similarly (i.e., complete vs. gradient, obligatory vs. optional, regressive vs. progressive). It concurrently assesses the contribution of speakers' articulation rate to the proportion…

Across languages, children do not comprehend 3SG/3PL subject-verb agreement before age five, despite early mastery in spontaneous speech. This study investigates subject-verb agreement in a language hitherto not studied in this respect, namely Dutch. The authors examine if (1) Dutch two- and three-year-olds comprehend subject-verb agreement and…

Most basic concepts are acquired during preschool period. There are studies indicating that the basic concept knowledge of children is related to language development, cognitive development, academic achievement and intelligence. The relationship between learning behaviors (sometime called learning or cognitive styles) and a child academic success…

We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for…

Optionality is a central phenomenon in second language acquisition (SLA), for which any adequate theory must account. Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) offer an appealing approach to it, using Roeper's Multiple Grammars Theory, which was created with first language in mind but which extends very naturally to SLA. They include…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

Purpose: This lead article of the Clinical Forum addresses some of the gaps that exist between clinical practice and current knowledge about instructional factors that influence learning and language development. Method: Topics reviewed and discussed include principles of learning, generalization, treatment intensity, processing interventions,…

In this study we investigate young children's knowledge of syntactic constraints on Noun Phrase reference by testing 30-month-olds' interpretation of two types of transitive sentences. In a preferential looking task, we find that children prefer different interpretations for transitive sentences whose object NP is a name (e.g., "She's patting…

Upon hearing a novel word, language learners must identify its correct meaning from a diverse set of situationally relevant options. Such referential ambiguity could be reduced through "repetitive" exposure to the novel word across diverging learning situations, a learning mechanism referred to as "cross-situational learning."…

This study focuses on morphophonology and frequency in past tense production. It was assessed whether Dutch five- and seven-year-old typically developing (TD) children and eight-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce the correct allomorph in regular, irregular, and novel past tense formation. Type frequency of the…

This study examined how Chinese children acquire the untaught positional constraints of stroke patterns that are embedded in left-right structured and top-bottom structured characters. Using an orthographic regularity pattern elicitation paradigm, 536 Hong Kong Chinese children at different levels of reading (kindergarten, 2nd, and 5th grades)…

This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. "John looks like he is sick") encode direct evidentiality. We then…

The infant-parent class offers the school's first opportunity for a prepared environment and utilizes observation as an important tool for parents. Purposeful work is given to both parents and their young children. Montessori principles, such as teaching sensitive periods for language and movement, convey one activity at a time for bringing…

In this lecture Professor Catherine Wallace explores the literacy and language development of two groups of EAL (English as an Additional Language) pupils in London schools: Year 5 pupils in a primary school and Year 8 new arrivals in a secondary school. As they navigate their way through the British educational system, the learners recount…