This article asks what happens to the learning of young children when they work regularly with a professional visual artist in their school. Through Creative Partnerships, a national programme initiated in 2002 to bring creative professionals into schools across England, some school children have had the opportunity for sustained project work with…

In her Keynote, Gathercole (2006) provides a comprehensive review regarding the nature of the nonword repetition (NWR) task and a compelling argument for the utility of the task as a robust index of children's phonological short-term storage capacity. She further argues that temporary phonological storage acts as a primitive learning mechanism…

The present study investigated the validity of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for a group of toddlers 30 months of age. Study 1 examined the concurrent validity of the CDI for a group of 38 late talkers. Significant correlations were found between the CDI and direct measures of language abilities. Study 2 used…

There is incomplete consensus on the anatomical demarcation of Broca's area in the left inferior frontal gyrus and its functional characterization remains a matter of debate. Exclusive syntactic specialization has been proposed, but is overall inconsistent with the neuroimaging literature. We examined three functional MRI (fMRI) datasets on…

A fair amount of descriptive research in the field of second language acquisition has looked at the presence of what have been labeled corrective recasts. This research has relied on the methodological practice of coding to identify particular turns as "corrective recasts." Often, the coding criteria make use of the notion of the maintenance of…

Non-adjacent dependencies characterize numerous features of English syntax, including certain verb tense structures and subject-verb agreement. This study utilized an artificial language paradigm to examine the contribution of item variability to the learning of these types of dependencies. Adult subjects with and without language-based learning…

We investigated how parents respond to young children's questions about the identity of artifacts. Children's questions were predominantly ambiguous about whether they were inquiring about name or function, but when their questions were more specific, they were almost always about function. For unfamiliar objects, parents responded with functional…

Efforts to gather data of various sorts--demographics, language-learning history, contact with native speakers, use of the language in the field--as they relate to participants in SLA research studies are inherent to understanding more about language acquisition and use. Scholars frequently develop questionnaires of their own, which are rarely…

This paper considers how implicit and explicit knowledge are dissociable but cooperative. It reviews various psychological and neurobiological processes by which explicit knowledge of form-meaning associations impacts upon implicit language learning. The interface is dynamic: It happens transiently during conscious processing, but the influence…

Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure,…

In this squib we examine the time course of children's acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kayne's (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional…

Purpose: Although mean length of utterance (MLU) is a useful benchmark in studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI), some empirical and interpretive issues are unresolved. The authors report on 2 studies examining, respectively, the concurrent validity and temporal stability of MLU equivalency between children with SLI and…

We examined the impact of using an animated software program (Team Up With Timo) on the expressive and receptive language abilities of five children ages 5-9 in a self-contained Learning and Language Disabilities class. We chose to use Team Up With Timo (Animated Speech Corporation) because it allows the teacher to personalize the animation for…

Prosodic information, such as word stress and speech rhythm, is important in language acquisition, and sensitivity to stress patterns is present from birth onwards. Exposure to prosodic properties of the native language occurs prenatally. Preterm birth and an associated lack of exposure to prosodic information are suspected to affect language…

The family unit and home domain have been and remain important in heritage language maintenance efforts. There are complex relationships between parental language attitudes, their application in everyday language management activities and the children's knowledge of home language vocabulary. The present large-scale study examined the family policy…