Over the last decade or so, the concept of multicompetence has attracted significant research attention in the field of applied linguistics and in particular in the study of multiple language use and learning. We argue that while research efforts concerned with multicompetence have been useful in advancing a more positive view of second language…

In learning the meaning of a new term, children need to fix its reference, learn its conventional meaning, and discover the meanings with which it contrasts. To do this, children must attend to adult speakers--the experts--and to their patterns of use. In the domain of color, children need to identify color terms as such, fix the reference of each…

Young children experience considerable difficulty in learning their first few color terms. One explanation for this difficulty is that initially they lack a conceptual representation of color sufficiently abstract to support word meaning. This hypothesis, that prior to learning color terms children do not represent color as an abstraction, was…

This article reviews the nature and function of recasts, a well-documented way of responding to young children. The paper challenges the definition of recast and argues that it is too broad a category to be useful, either for theories of language development or for practice. In particular, various forms of recast have featured in intervention…

Recent clinical observations, in the absence of experimental data, appear to suggest that written expression in conduction aphasics parallels their speech (Goodglass, 1992). The current study undertakes an analysis of word level writing in two conduction aphasics, and attempts to explore the posited 'parallel' relationship between speech…

The location of phonological phrase boundaries was shown to affect lexical access by English-learning infants of 10 and 13 months of age. Experiments 1 and 2 used the head-turn preference procedure: infants were familiarized with two bisyllabic words, then presented with sentences that either contained the familiarized words or contained both…

This study investigated social attention impairments in autism (social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress) and their relations to language ability. Three- to four-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 72), 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children (n = 34), and 12- to 46-month-old typically…

This study compares the linguistic development of a gifted bilingual child from birth to 7 with that of subjects in first language acquisition research. The aspects analyzed are phonology, morphology (word formation), lexicon, modality (encoding of speaker's attitude towards the truthfulness of a proposition), syntax (sentence construction),…

This study investigates three aspects of social communication in 12-month-old infants and their caregivers: (a) caregiver conversational style, (b) caregiver gesture, and (c) infant engagement. Differences in caregiver behavior during passive joint engagement were associated with language outcomes. Although total mean duration of infant time in…

Children with Down syndrome (DS) have cognitive disabilities resulting from trisomy 21. Language-learning difficulties, especially expressive language problems, are an important component of the phenotype of this population. Many individuals with DS are born into bilingual environments. To date, however, there is almost no information available…

Background: Previous studies in the literature report that deaf individuals who experience late access to language perform poorly on false belief tests of Theory of Mind (ToM) compared with age-matched deaf and hearing controls exposed to language early. Methods: A group of 22 deaf Nicaraguans (aged 7 to 39 years) who learned Nicaraguan Sign…

This paper examines what children believe about unmapped number words--those number words whose exact meanings children have not yet learned. In Study one, 31 children (ages 2-10 to 4-2) judged that the application of "five" and "six" changes when numerosity changes, although they did not know that equal sets must have the same number word. In…

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. "Cognition," 87, 151-178], we provided cross-linguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument…

Alexander Graham Bell is often portrayed as either hero or villain of deaf individuals and the Deaf community. His writings, however, indicate that he was neither, and was not as clearly definite in his beliefs about language as is often supposed. The following two articles, reprinted from The Educator (1898), Vol. V, pp. 3?4 and pp. 38?44,…

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in prelinguistic vocal production during the first 20 months of life. Vocalizations were classified into 23 mutually exclusive and exhaustive types, and grouped into five ascending levels using the Stark Assessment of Early Vocal Development-Revised (SAEVD-R). Data from 30 typically developing…