Although language sample analysis (LSA) is considered an important tool for high-quality child language assessment, surveys have found that its use is quite limited by school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Two of the reasons often cited are limited time and limited expertise (Kemp & Klee, 1997; Pavelko et al., 2016). This study…

Most research on the mechanisms underlying referential mapping has assumed that learning occurs in ostensive contexts, where label and referent co-occur, and that form and meaning are linked by arbitrary convention alone. In the present study, we focus on "iconicity" in language, that is, resemblance relationships between form and…

As an initial step of a larger grant-funded project, this pilot study examined how providing preschool teachers in low socio-economic urban areas with a traditional professional development workshop and subsequent coaching on dialogic reading (DR) strategies affected their storybook reading. Effects on children's receptive and expressive language…

The influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream, in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we…

Phonological characteristics and frequencies of stems and allomorphs have been explored as possible factors causing differences in production accuracies between allomorphic forms. However, previous findings are not consistent and the relative contributions of these factors are unclear. This study investigated target and erroneous productions of…

Adults adjust the informativeness of their utterances to the needs of their addressee. For children, however, relevant evidence is mixed. In this article we explore the communicative circumstances under which children offer informative descriptions. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-old children and adults described a target event from a pair of…

In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the…

Infants begin to understand some of the meanings of the adjective "good" at around thirteen months, but it is not clear when they start to map it to concepts in the moral domain. We investigated infants' and toddlers' knowledge of "good" in the domains of help and fairness. Participants at 20 and 30 months were shown computer…

Background: Language exposure is known to be a key factor influencing bilingual vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. There is, however, a lack of knowledge in terms of exposure effects in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and, especially, in interaction with age of onset (AoO) of second language…

Purpose: Spoken language sample analysis (LSA) is widely considered to be a critical component of assessment for child language disorders. It is our best window into a preschool child's everyday expressive communicative skills. However, historically, the process can be cumbersome, and reference values against which LSA findings can be…

Language is vital for social interaction, leading some to suggest early linguistic ability paves the way for good adolescent mental health. The relation between age-5 vocabulary and adolescent internalizing symptoms was examined in two U.K. birth cohorts that are nationally representative in terms of sex, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status: the…

Purpose: Fathers play a critical but underresearched role in their children's cognitive and linguistic development. Focusing on two-parent families with a mother and a father, the present longitudinal study explores the amount of paternal input infants hear during the first 2 years of life, how this input changes over time, and how it relates to…

Associations have been observed between socioeconomic status (SES) and language outcomes from early childhood, but individual variability is high. Exposure to high levels of stress, often associated with low-SES status, might influence how parents and infants interact within the early language environment. Differences in these early language…

The transaction of children's core language skill and their home learning environment was assessed across 5 waves from infancy (15 months) up to adolescence (11 years) in 1,751 low-socioeconomic status families. Child core language skill and the quality of the home learning environment were each stable across waves, and the two covaried at each…

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists need tools that can accurately estimate bilingual children's language abilities and thus help avoid misdiagnoses. This study addresses this need by investigating the accuracy of a novel curriculum-based dynamic assessment of narratives in distinguishing bilingual children with language difficulties (LDs) from…