The English dative alternation has received much attention in the literature on argument structure acquisition in children. However, the data on the acquisition of this alternation have consistently revealed a counter-intuitive pattern: children look more proficient with the lower frequency prepositional form of the dative than with the higher…

Previous studies of individual differences have revealed strong correlations between children's vocabulary and grammatical abilities, and these data have been used to support theoretical accounts positing direct developmental relations between these two areas of language. However, between-person differences do not necessarily reflect…

Background: Current UK measures of early spoken language comprehension require manipulation of toys and/or verbal responses and are not accessible to children with severe motor impairments. The Computer-Based Instrument for Low motor Language Testing (C-BiLLT) (originally validated in Dutch) is a computerized test of spoken language comprehension…

Early childhood educators play a crucial role in language and literacy development and in promoting academic readiness. Shared book reading presented in early childhood classrooms can positively impact a child's language and literacy growth. The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the effectiveness of a shared book reading program…

This study examines the reflections of using Pixton, the digital comics Web 2.0 tool, on the basic language skills of international exchange students under the Erasmus+ program. For this purpose, student-made comic strips were used to teach the basic grammar of the language, which resulted in using the language in their daily lives and supporting…

Background: Early morphological awareness skills are well-known predictors of later literacy skills, but little is known on how young children develop this early morphological knowledge without formal instruction. Home literacy environment is considered as a supporting context for several early literacy skills' growth, but no studies have examined…

Because language-related skills in early childhood can predict reading and writing skills in school, as well as social engagement in adulthood, it is important to implement concrete actions to assist in the development of language skills among these children (Council of Ministers of Education, Canada [CMEC], 2021). Knowledge of existing research…

Purpose: Perceptual learning and production practice are basic mechanisms that children depend on to acquire adult levels of speech accuracy. In this study, we examined perceptual learning and production practice as they contributed to changes in speech accuracy in 3- and 4-year-old children. Our primary focus was manipulating the order of…

Recent neurophysiological theories propose that the cerebral hemispheres collaborate to resolve the complex temporal nature of speech, such that left-hemisphere (or bilateral) gamma-band oscillatory activity would specialize in coding information at fast rates (phonemic information), whereas right-hemisphere delta- and theta-band activity would…

In this commentary, I discuss why, despite the existence of gradience in phonetics and phonology, there is still a need for abstract representations. Most proponents of exemplar models assume multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for an integration of the gradient and the categorical. Ben Ambridge's dismissal of generative models such as…

Novel word learning and consolidation was studied in inexperienced language learners, to conceptually replicate and extend a similar study in experienced learners by Bakker, Takashima, Van Hell, Janzen, and McQueen (2015). Participants learned definitions for novel words on Day 1 and for another set of novel words on Day 2. Brain potentials…

We trained a computational model (the Chunk-Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child-caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism--backward transitional probability--is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We…

Preschool-aged bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can keep pace with their monolingual peers with ASD. However, can older children with ASD continue to do so as language demands become greater? Also, can they reach language levels similar to those of neurotypically developing (ND) bilingual children? The current study compares…

English-monolingual children develop a shape bias early in language acquisition, such that they more often generalize a novel label based on shape than other features. Spanish-monolingual children, however, do not show this bias to the same extent (Hahn & Cantrell, 2012). Studying children who are simultaneously learning both Spanish and…

Purpose: This study tested the effects of background speech babble on novel word learning in preschool children with a multisession paradigm. Method: Eight 3-year-old children were exposed to a total of 8 novel word-object pairs across 2 story books presented digitally. Each story contained 4 novel consonant-vowel-consonant nonwords. Children were…