What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We…

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children's vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens…

Background: Between 90% and 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who often need support with how to adapt their communication. Parent-child interaction (PCI) is an important predictor of deaf children's future language development. It is therefore necessary for professionals to assess parents' strengths and needs to identify areas for…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to (a) provide evidence for a theoretical model of between-language interaction in bilingual phonological production through the examination of substitution error patterns and to (b) provide developmental data on bilingual children with and without speech sound impairments for use in clinical assessment and…

Purpose: Many models of language comprehension assume that listeners predict the continuation of an incoming linguistic stimulus immediately after its onset, based on only partial linguistic and contextual information. Their related developmental models try to determine which cues (e.g., semantic or morphosyntactic) trigger such prediction, and to…

Person-referring pronouns in the first and second person (I, your) have been viewed as signs of increasing social understanding in children due to their shifting reference properties. However, they are linguistically complex elements and might depend on general language development. We used longitudinal transcript data from Manchester corpus (12…

The aim of this study was to investigate the acoustic vowel space area in infant directed speech (IDS). The research question is whether the vowel space is expanded or remains constant in IDS. A corpus of spontaneous interactions of 9 dyads followed monthly from the age of 6 to 24 months was analyzed. The occurrences in the parents' speech of each…

Children's exposure to talk about conceptual categories plays a powerful role in shaping their conceptual development. However, it remains unclear when parents begin to talk about categories with young children and whether such talk relates to children's language skills. This study examines relations between parents' talk about conceptual…

Early exploratory behaviors have been proposed to facilitate children's learning, impacting motor, cognitive, language, and social development. This study related the performance of behaviors used to explore oneself to behaviors used to explore objects, and then related both types of exploratory behaviors to motor, language, and cognitive measures…

Studies on children's understanding of counting examine when and how children acquire the cardinal principle: the idea that the last word in a counted set reflects the cardinal value of the set. Using Wynn's (1990) Give-N Task, researchers classify children who can count to generate large sets as having acquired the cardinal principle…

In acquiring a native language, the input children receive, to an unneglectable extent, shapes the rate of acquisition and the ultimate achievement. This in turn has cascading effects on many aspects of later development, including but not limited to language. Providing optimal input for early language development, therefore, is of major interest…

This article presents a developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The literature thus far indicates that the pathway of development involves first producing only…

In "Emile," Rousseau advances significant ideas about language, language learning and teaching: He posits a universal natural language that develops as the child matures; focuses on 'private' words invented by children, on the challenge facing children in their understanding of exceptions to general rules of the mother tongue and on…

Despite attention by educators and researchers to the advancement of robotics research in education, little experimental research has been conducted on the use of robots in language education for young children. This paper reports on a study aimed at providing an improved English language development assessment questionnaire specifically for use…

The educational landscape has undergone tremendous change due to the rapid development of technology, with virtual learning emerging as a prominent teaching method. In this regard, the Flipped Learning Class (FLC) model has recently been adopted as a cutting-edge approach. In this model, traditional classroom activities are logically reversed…