Purpose: Theories of morphosyntactic development must account for between-child differences in morphosyntactic growth rates. This study extends Legate and Yang's (2007) theoretically motivated cross-linguistic approach to determine if variation in properties of parent input accounts for differences in the growth of tense productivity. Method:…

Parametric systems have been proposed as models of how humans represent knowledge about language, motivated in part as a way to explain children's rapid acquisition of linguistic knowledge. Given this, it seems reasonable to examine if children with knowledge of parameters could in fact acquire the adult system from the data available to them.…

This study investigates the acquisition of word-initial Korean obstruents (i.e. stops, affricates and fricatives). Korean obstruents are characterized by a three-way contrast among stops and affricates (i.e. fortis, aspirated and lenis) and a two-way fricative contrast (i.e. fortis and lenis). All these obstruents are voiceless word-initially.…

This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the sixth MOrphological PROcessing Conference (MOPROC), which was kept in June 2009 in Turku, Finland. The issue contains 13 articles by leading scholars in the field of morphological processing. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and…

Healthy adults can identify spoken words at a remarkable speed, by incrementally analyzing word-onset information. It is currently unknown how this adult-level speed of spoken-word processing emerges during children's native-language acquisition. In a picture-word mismatch paradigm, we manipulated the semantic congruency between picture contexts…

This paper is written in response to a paper by Maria Rivera on issues of language and identity. I give an autobiographical account of my own experiences in relation to language identity and colonialism. I relate language and issues of alienation during the colonial time and I reflect on how that past is still currently distorting the way we look…

Do children who go on to develop dyslexia show normal verbal and nonverbal development before reading onset? According to the aptitude-achievement discrepancy model, dyslexia is defined as a discrepancy between intelligence and reading achievement. One of the underlying assumptions is that the general cognitive development of children who fail to…

This ethnographic study examines the role of Japanese students' culture and its effects on the rate of acquisition of academic English. It is based on observation of classes in Japanese schools, both in Japan and Germany, as well as in an international school, together with interviews, questionnaires, student responses and case studies over a…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the effects of the Teach-Model-Coach-Review instructional approach on caregivers' use of four enhanced milieu teaching (EMT) language support strategies and on their children's use of expressive language. Method: Four caregiver-child dyads participated in a single-subject, multiple-baseline study.…

Discussions that occur during book reading between parents and preschool children relate to children's language development, especially discussions during picture books that include extended discourse, a form of abstract language. While a recent report shows increased chapter book reading among families with preschool children, it is unknown…

Idiomatic expressions pose substantial learning difficulties for learners across languages and tend to be acquired later in the course of language development both in L1 and L2. A number of factors have been identified as contributing to this difficulty. However, cross-linguistic studies on figurative language acquisition are still rare. The…

Background: Pitch perception is enhanced among persons with autism. We extended this finding to memory for pitch and melody among school-aged children. Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate pitch memory in musically untrained children with autism spectrum disorders, aged 7-13 years, and to compare it to that of age- and…

Aim: To determine the effect of parent education on adaptive behaviour, autism symptoms and cognitive/language skills of young children with autistic disorder. Method: A randomised group comparison design involving a parent education and counselling intervention and a parent education and behaviour management intervention to control for parent…

Language and literacy skills are instrumental to success at school and early success with writing is a key factor in literacy development. By eight years of age, children spend up to half of their school day engaged in writing tasks suggesting that those who find learning to write difficult may be disadvantaged. The ability to hear and record…

In this article, I explore the incongruence between the federal government's proposed First Nations Education Act and the approach of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) regarding language and culture education. I also examine research concerning potential outcomes of their approaches to determine what would be most beneficial to learners.…