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,…

There are many kinds of speech and language disorders that can affect children. This fact sheet will present four major areas in which these impairments occur. These are the areas of: (1) Articulation; (2) Fluency; (3) Voice; and (4) Language. Following a brief narrative on a day in the life of a Speech Language Pathologist, this fact sheet…

This article reviews how a receptive, bilingual four-year-old increased her Spanish productive-language skills over five weeks as she engaged in Spanish-language play sessions with bilingual peers. The data show her growing participation in group verbal interactions along with her growing production of her weaker language. In addition, a…

Matching-to-sample and sequence training procedures were used to develop responding to stimulus classes that were considered analogous to 3 aspects of verbal behavior: identifying synonyms and parts of speech,and using syntax. Matching-to-sample procedures were used to train 12 paired associates from among 24 stimuli. These pairs were analogous to…

Word segmentation, that is, discovering the boundaries between words that are embedded in a continuous speech stream, is an important faculty for language learners; humans solve this task partly by calculating transitional probabilities between sounds. Behavioral and ERP studies suggest that detection of sequential probabilities (statistical…

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt…

When mobile organisms are spatially disoriented, for instance by rapid repetitive movement, they must re-establish orientation. Past research has shown that the geometry of enclosing spaces is consistently used for reorientation by a wide variety of species, but that non-geometric features are not always used. Based on these findings, some…

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…

Background: This study investigated the relationship between phonological and syntactic disorders of French-speaking children with specific language impairment in production. Aims: To compare three theories (pure phonological theory, surface theory, and mapping theory) of language developmental disorders, all of which view phonological…

Phonological awareness skills begin to develop at preschool ages and support reading skills during school ages. Studies on phonological awareness show great relationship with reading skills development. Since literacy talents such as phonological awareness and vocabulary represent future success in reading, assisting literacy skills during…

The Musical Play program is designed to assist children ages 2 to 5 and their parents. The program creators sought to help families build a repertoire of songs and activities for everyday living and to encourage musical play at home. The program includes developmentally appropriate songs, materials, and activities and incorporates a wide variety…

Mothers' use of specific types of object motion in synchrony with object naming was examined, along with infants' joint attention to the mother and object, as a predictor of word learning. During a semistructured 3-min play episode, mothers (N = 24) taught the names of 2 toy objects to their preverbal 6- to 8-month-old infants. The episodes were…

The article by Carota and Sirigu addresses a fundamental issue, namely the domain specificity of people's ability to learn and implement sequential structures of events. The authors review theoretical positions and empirical findings related to this issue, providing a useful summary of representative models of sequential event structures, and a…

High school teacher J. Arias recommends valuable activities that teachers can use to "build communities of respect, tolerance, and acceptance" for language diversity in schools. Many of the activities are directed toward helping native English speakers empathize with and better understand English language learners' experiences with language…