-
A corpus analysis of child and child-directed speech in Palestinian Arabic: A first approach to syntactic development J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-06-16 Tala Nazzal, Anna Gavarró
We present a new corpus of child and child-directed speech (CDS) in Palestinian Arabic. It includes transcriptions following the CHILDES guidelines and features recordings of 16 monolingual Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with an age range of 19–58 months and their adult interlocutors. We analyse the children’s morphosyntactic development and identify a variety of target word orders (45 in child
-
Early home learning environment and children’s concurrent and longitudinal language development J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-06-11 Irena Lovčević
This study assessed the association between home learning environment (HLE) at 3 years of age and children’s concurrent and longitudinal vocabulary skills. HLE consisted of the following activities done with primary caregivers: storytelling, drawing, music, toys and games, everyday home activities, playing outdoors, and reading. Results demonstrated that a higher HLE score at 3 years was concurrently
-
A Typological Approach to Child Language Research – The Case of Whole-Word Phonology J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-06-04 Clifton Pye, Donald N. Stengel, Elena Babatsouli, Hannah S. Sarvasy
We present the typological approach to child language research. The typological approach places language diversity at the centre of acquisition research, thereby limiting arbitrary adjustments to theory and practice. We apply the typological approach to Ingram’s (2002) measures of whole-word phonological complexity (PMLU) and proximity (PWP). Our generalised PMLUg measure takes into account crosslinguistic
-
Children Learn Causatives Despite Pervasive Ellipsis: Evidence from Turkish J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-05-21 Guanghao You, Ebru Ger, Moritz M. Daum, Sabine Stoll
In this study, we explore how children learn causatives from the language they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Previous research has argued that argument structure is a crucial facilitator for learning causatives. Here, we examine the role of argument structure in the acquisition of morphological and lexical causatives. We use Turkish as a test case which allows argument ellipsis and ask whether
-
Reaching Meaning through Language: What can Children Tell Us about Distributivity? J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-05-21 Chiara Saponaro, Desiré Carioti, Martina Riva, Maria Teresa Guasti
Sentences with a plural subject receive a distributive reading if the predicate refers to the atomic members, or a collective one if it relates to the whole group. Previous accounts suggest that the distributive representation includes an additional semantic operator, and comprehension experiments show that adults interpret an ambiguous sentence as collective. However, children accept distributive
-
Exploring the Influence of Socioeconomic Status on Pragmatic Language: Do Executive Function and Grammar Comprehension Have a Mediating Role? J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-05-21 Elena Cravet, Maria Carmen Usai
This study explores the relationships among socioeconomic status (SES), executive function (EF), grammar comprehension (GC), and pragmatic language (PL) in children aged 8–11. By employing a structural equation modelling approach, we aimed to investigate the direct and indirect effects of these variables on PL, a crucial aspect of child development involved in the formation of social relationships
-
Leamos Juntos! Bilingual books support Latine parents’ Spanish language use during book-sharing interactions J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-05-21 Alejandra Reinoso, Milton Guendica, Adriana Weisleder
Book-sharing interactions expose children to diverse language input, yet most research on parent–child book-sharing has focused on monolingual parents reading monolingual books. This study investigated how Latine bilingual parents in the U.S. share different types of books with their children. Twenty-four Latine parents and their three- to five-year-old children shared a monolingual English-only book
-
Cross-talker lexical tone discrimination in infancy J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-04-22 Ye Feng, René Kager, Regine Lai, Patrick C. M. Wong
This study investigated how infants deal with cross-talker variability in the perception of native lexical tones, paying specific attention to developmental changes and the role of task demands. Using the habituation-based visual fixation procedures, we tested Cantonese-learning infants of different age groups on their ability to discriminate Cantonese Tone 1 (high level) and Tone 3 (mid level) produced
-
“Panda” or “Bear, cat”: Mandarin-speaking preschoolers use duration and pitch to distinguish compounds and lists J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-04-22 Feng Xu, Ping Tang, Katherine Demuth, Nan Xu Rattanasone
Compounds (e.g., jellybeans) and list forms (e.g., jelly, beans) can be distinguished by the presence or absence of boundaries, marked by durational and pitch cues. Studies have shown that 5-year-olds learning English have acquired both cues for distinguishing compounds and lists. However, it is not clear how and when this ability is acquired by children speaking tonal languages, such as Mandarin.
-
Learning to comprehend and explain spatial metaphors for time in Chinese J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-04-21 Jing Paul, Lauren J. Stites, Şeyda Özçalışkan
Time is frequently structured in terms of motion as moving-time (e.g., “summer is coming”), moving-ego (e.g., “we approach winter”), or sequence-as-position (e.g., “winter follows autumn”) across the world’s languages, including Chinese – a language that shows greater variability in its expression of such metaphors. Using a metaphor explanation and a metaphor comprehension task, we tested 60 children
-
Accent the positive: An investigation into five-year-olds’ implicit attitudes towards different regional accents J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-04-14 Ella Jeffries, Laurel Lawyer, Amanda Cole, Stephanie Martin Vega
Regional accent biases in 27 Essex five-year-olds are investigated. This study is the first to analyse implicit language attitudes by measuring children’s neural activity (event-related potentials) while they take part in an Implicit Association Test. Both measures find a preference towards the prestigious accent, Standard Southern British English (SSBE), which is associated with cleverness (CLEVER)
-
Co-speech gesture comprehension in autistic children J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-04-14 Pauline Wolfer, Franziska Baumeister, David Cohen, Nevena Dimitrova, Ehsan Solaimani, Stephanie Durrleman
Co-speech gestures accompany or replace speech in communication. Studies investigating how autistic children understand them are scarce and inconsistent and often focus on decontextualized, iconic gestures. This study compared 73 three- to twelve-year-old autistic children with 73 neurotypical peers matched on age, non-verbal IQ, and morphosyntax. Specifically, we examined (1) their ability to understand
-
The Developmental Puzzle of Irony Understanding: Is Epistemic Vigilance the Missing Piece? J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-04-11 Ana Milosavljevic, Thomas Castelain, Nausicaa Pouscoulous, Diana Mazzarella
The prolonged developmental window of irony understanding opens up the question of which socio-cognitive repertoire underlies this pragmatic capacity. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between epistemic vigilance and irony understanding in 5/6- and 6/7-year-old children using a picture selection task. We assessed children’s vigilance towards unreliable informants and manipulated
-
Modeling monolingual and bilingual children’s language attitudes towards variation in metropolitan France J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-04-07 Anna Ghimenton, Christophe Coupé, Nelly Bonhomme, Jinke Song, Vincent Arnaud
This study investigates four factors (age, sex, SES, and bilingualism) influencing children’s language attitude (LA) development. We examine LAs in monolingual (N = 46) and bilingual (N = 71) children (59–143 months) living in France using a matched guise experiment where the children evaluated normative and non-normative variants of five linguistic constructions in French. Using a mixed-effects model
-
Due to increased variability, the expanded vowel and tone space in Mandarin IDS does not lead to enhanced contrasts J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-03-28 Ping Tang, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, Katherine Demuth, Titia Benders
Expanded vowel or tone space in IDS has traditionally been interpreted as evidence of enhanced acoustic contrasts. However, emerging evidence from various languages shows that the within-category acoustic variability of vowels and tones also increases in IDS, offsetting the benefit of space expansion and leading to non-enhanced, or reduced acoustic contrasts. This study re-analysed a corpus of Mandarin
-
An Investigation of Hand Use in Preschool Children: Vocabulary and Social Competence Predict Cognitive Development J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-03-28 Nicole A. van Rootselaar, Fangfang Li, Robbin Gibb, Claudia L.R. Gonzalez
Previous research indicates that strong right-hand preference predicts performance in other skills, such as vocabulary size and executive function (EF). The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between these functions, as well as social competence (SC), in a sample of preschool children. We used parent questionnaires and/or tabletop assessments to measure hand preference, fine motor
-
Language Development Between 30 and 48 Months in Monolingual Slovenian-Speaking Children: A Study Using the Slovenian Adaptation of the Macarthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory CDI–III J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-03-27 Urška Fekonja, Kaja Hacin-Beyazoglu, Ljubica Marjanovič-Umek
The main aim of this study, which presents the Slovenian adaptation of the Macarthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory CDI–III, was to investigate the characteristics of language development in monolingual Slovenian-speaking children aged 30–48 months. In addition, we examined the relationships between different measures of child language assessed by the CDI–III, namely vocabulary, grammar
-
The language of mechanical support in children: Is it “Sticking,” “Hanging,” or simply “On”? J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 Julia Hauss, Jennifer Barbosa, Paul Muentener, Laura Lakusta
How do children learn the language-to-concept mappings within the domain of Mechanical Support – a spatial domain involving varied and complex force-dynamic relations between objects based on specific mechanisms (stickiness, clips, etc.)? We explore how four- and six-year-olds, and adults encode dynamic events and static configurations of Mechanical Support via attachment (picture put on a door). Participants
-
Real-time spoken word recognition in deaf and hard of hearing preschoolers: Effects of phonological competition J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-03-05 Rosanne Abrahamse, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Rebecca Holt, Katherine Demuth, Titia Benders
This study investigates how phonological competition affects real-time spoken word recognition in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) preschoolers compared to peers with hearing in the normal range (NH). Three-to-six-year olds (27 with NH, 18 DHH, including uni- and bilateral hearing losses) were instructed to look at pictures that corresponded to words alongside a phonological competitor (e.g., /bin-pin/)
-
Shifting toward progressive and balanced interaction: A longitudinal corpus study of children’s responses to Who-questions in Japanese J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-02-26 Tomoko Tatsumi, Julian Pine
Children’s speech becomes longer and more complex as they develop, but the reasons for this have been insufficiently studied. This study examines how changing linguistic choices in children are linked to interactive factors by analysing Who-question sequences in Japanese child–caregiver conversations. The interactive factors in focus are progressivity and balanced joint activity, which are core aspects
-
Acquisition of Morphological Variation: An Elicitation Experiment on Children’s Production of Parallel Forms in Croatian and Estonian J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-02-21 Virve-Anneli Vihman, Gordana Hržica, Mari Aigro, Sara Košutar, Tomislava Bošnjak Botica
Children’s acquisition of variation in the target language depends on a number of factors not yet well understood. This study probes the acquisition of morphological variation in two unrelated languages, Croatian (Slavic) and Estonian (Finnic), focussing on parallel forms of a lexeme expressing a single grammatical category (a phenomenon known as morphological overabundance). We conducted a cross-linguistic
-
Bilingual Vocabulary Development in Mexican Indigenous Infants: The Effects of Language Exposure from Home and Mothers’ Language Dominance J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-02-21 Stanislav Mulík, Natalia Arias-Trejo
This study evaluates how language exposure and mothers’ language dominance relate to infants’ early bilingual vocabulary development in a low-socioeconomic status (SES) sample from an understudied population: Mexican Indigenous bilinguals. Thirty-two mother–child dyads participated. All mothers were bilingual speakers of Spanish and one of Mexican Indigenous languages, including Zapotec, Mixtec, and
-
Learning Irony in School: Effects of Metapragmatic Training J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-02-18 Henri Olkoniemi, Tuomo Häikiö, Milla Merinen, Jasmiina Manninen, Matti Laine, Penny M. Pexman
Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded
-
Relative contributions of predictive vs. associative processes to infant looking behavior during language comprehension J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-02-10 Tracy E. Reuter, Lauren L. Emberson
Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to semantic-relatedness to differentiate associative vs. predictive
-
Bilingual Toddlers’ Vocabulary Growth Interacts with Existing Knowledge and Cross-Linguistic Similarity J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-02-04 Serene Siow, Irina Lepadatu, Nicola A. Gillen, Kim Plunkett
We explored whether bilingual toddlers make use of semantic and phonological overlap between their languages to learn new words. We analysed cross-sectional and longitudinal CDI data on the words understood and produced by 1.0 to 3.0-year-old bilingual toddlers with English and one additional language. Cognates were more likely to be understood and produced compared to non-cognates. Cognate effects
-
Task effects in children’s word recall: Expanding the reverse production effect J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-02-04 Belén López Assef, Tania Zamuner
Words said aloud are typically recalled more than words studied under other techniques. In certain circumstances, production does not lead to this memory advantage. We investigated the nature of this effect by varying the task during learning. Children aged five to six years were trained on novel words which required no action (Heard) compared to Verbal-Speech (production), Non-Verbal-Speech (stick
-
Different paths to multilingualism in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): Naturalistic and non-interactive J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-20 Iris Hindi, Natalia Meir
This study is one of the few research efforts investigating unexpected non-interactive foreign language acquisition in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Participants included 46 English-Hebrew-speaking children (ages 4;10 to 12;0): 14 autistic children who acquired English via non-interactive input (ASD-NI); 12 autistic children (ASD-Nat), and 20 non-autistic children with typical language
-
Bilingual children reach early language milestones at the same age as monolingual peers J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-15 Karolina Muszyńska, Grzegorz Krajewski, Agnieszka Dynak, Nina Gram Garmann, Anna Sara H. Romøren, Magdalena Łuniewska, Katie Alcock, Napoleon Katsos, Joanna Kołak, Hanne Gram Simonsen, Pernille Hansen, Magdalena Krysztofiak, Krzysztof Sobota, Ewa Haman
In this longitudinal study, we compare the age of reaching early developmental milestones in bilingual and monolingual children and between the bilinguals’ two languages. We present data from 302 Polish bilinguals (living outside of Poland with various majority languages) and 302 Polish monolinguals, aged M = 12.78 months on study entry (range: 0–24 months), matched on sex, age at study entry, duration
-
An Evaluation of LENA Start™ Using Measures Derived from Parent–Child Interactions J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-13 Kirstin Kuchler, Marianne Elmquist, Scott R. McConnell, Lizbeth H. Finestack
It is important to assess learning in both familiar and unfamiliar conditions to determine the extent of learning generalisation. In this study, we evaluated parent language outcomes of LENA Start™, a parent-implemented intervention, using distal measures derived from a parent–child free play interaction. Forty-four parents and their child (mean: 20.8 months) participated in LENA Start™ or early childhood
-
The dynamics of initiation in caregiver–child conversational interactions J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-13 Jun Ho Chai, Jongmin Jung, Eon-Suk Ko
We investigated the dynamics of communicative initiation in infant−caregiver interactions across ages and language abilities. Analyses of 228 Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) recordings from 141 Korean adult−child dyads (60 girls; aged 7−30 months) replicated the initiator effect reported in North American populations. This effect, demonstrated by longer utterances, more frequent speech, and shorter
-
Null subject comprehension and production revisited: a look at English and Italian J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-13 Juliana Gerard, Muskaan Singh, Giulia Bencini, Virginia Valian
This study will investigate how children acquire the option to drop the subject of a sentence, or null subjects (e.g., “Tickles me” instead of “He tickles me”). In languages that do not permit null subjects, children produce sentences with null subjects from 1 to 3 years of age. This non-adultlike production has been explained by two main accounts: first, the null subject sentences may accurately reflect
-
Prosodic variation between contexts in infant-directed speech J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-13 Jenna DiStefano, Michelle Cohn, Georgia Zellou, Katharine Graf Estes
Speakers consider their listeners and adjust the way they communicate. One well-studied example is the register of infant-directed speech (IDS), which differs acoustically from speech directed to adults. However, little work has explored how parents adjust speech to infants across different contexts. This is important because infants and parents engage in many activities throughout each day. The current
-
The relationship between working memory, production, and comprehension: evidence from children’s errors in complex wh questions J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-13 C. Jane Lutken, Geraldine Legendre
English-speaking children sometimes make errors in production and comprehension of biclausal questions, known as “Scope-Marking Errors”. In production, these errors surface as medial wh questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? (Thornton, 1990)). In comprehension, children respond to questions like How did the boy say what he caught? by answering what was caught (de Villiers & Roeper,
-
How strong is the relationship between caregiver speech and language development? A meta-analysis J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-10 Joseph R. Coffey, Jesse Snedeker
A growing body of research has found that talking to young children is positively associated with language outcomes. However, there is tremendous heterogeneity in the design of these studies, which could potentially affect the strength and reliability of this association. The present meta-analysis, comprising 4760 participants across 71 studies, goes beyond prior research by including: 1) more recent
-
More than just a happy talk? Evidence for functional pitch and utterance length modifications in infant-, spouse-, and dog-directed communication J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-10 Édua Koós-Hutás, Shanjida Afrin, Alexandra Barbara Kovács, Tamás Faragó, Lőrinc András Filep, József Topál, Anna Gergely
By comparing infant-directed speech to spouse- and dog-directed talk, we aimed to investigate how pitch and utterance length are modulated by speakers considering the speech context and the partner’s expected needs and capabilities. We found that mean pitch was modulated in line with the partner’s attentional needs, while pitch range and utterance length were modulated according to the partner’s expected
-
Motherese Directed at Prelinguistic Infants at Risk for Neurological Disorders: An Exploratory Study J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-10 Okko Räsänen, Manu Airaksinen, Viviana Marchi, Olena Chorna, Andrea Guzzetta, Fabrizia Festante
To investigate how a high risk for infant neurological impairment affects the quality of infant verbal interactions, and in particular properties of infant-directed speech, spontaneous interactions between 14 mothers and their 4.5-month-old infants at high risk for neurological disorders (7 female) were recorded and acoustically compared with those of 14 dyads with typically developing infants (8 female)
-
The role of age of arrival and language environment factors in Arabic heritage language development: A longitudinal study J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2025-01-10 Johanne Paradis, Adriana Soto-Corominas, Evangelia Daskalaki, Redab Al Janaideh, Xi Chen, Alexandra Gottardo
The Arabic development of Syrian refugee children (N = 133; mean age = 9;4 at Time 1) was examined over 3 time periods during their first five years in Canada. Children were administered sentence repetition and receptive vocabulary tasks in English and Arabic, and information about age-of-arrival (AOA), schooling in Arabic and language environment factors was obtained via parent report. Older AOA was
-
Cognitive skills differentially influence narrative macrostructure in bilinguals’ L1 and L2 J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-27 Freideriki Tselekidou, Elizabeth Stadtmiller, Assunta Süss, Katrin Lindner, Natalia Gagarina
This study explored cognitive effects on narrative macrostructure in both languages of 38 Russian-German bilinguals aged 4;6 to 5;1‚ while controlling for demographic factors (sex, socioeconomic status) and language proficiency. Macrostructure was operationalised as story structure (SS) and story complexity (SC) using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Nonverbal cognitive subtasks
-
Vocabulary trajectories in German-speaking children from 18 months to three years: a growth mixture model J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Eveline Pinstock, Satyam Antonio Schramm
Children acquire vocabulary at different growth rates. The aim of this study was to identify subgroups of different vocabulary trajectories in a community sample of L1 German-speaking children aged 1;6 to 3;0 to enlarge the understanding of vocabulary trajectories. Parents filled out vocabulary checklists at four measurement times, each six months apart. Growth mixture modelling was used to naturally
-
Maternal underestimations and overestimations of their infants’ word comprehension: effects on mothers’ verbal input and infants’ receptive vocabulary J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-16 Sura Ertaş, Aylin C. Küntay, Aslı Aktan-Erciyes
Infants’ language is often measured indirectly via parent reports, but mothers may underestimate or overestimate their infants’ word comprehension. The current study examined estimations of mothers from diverse educational backgrounds regarding their infants’ word comprehension and how these estimations are associated with their verbal input and infants’ receptive vocabulary at 14 months. We compared
-
Navajo Verbs in Child Speech J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-16 Melvatha R. Chee
This study investigates Navajo verbs produced by four children, ages 4;07 to 11;02, during conversations with their caretakers. Analyses of 1600 verbs demonstrate that the bisyllabic verb form, consisting of a verb stem and a portion of the prefix string, is the most common pattern produced by the children. This indicates that Navajo-speaking children use meaningful units of verbal morphology that
-
An empirical study on native Mandarin-speaking children’s metonymy comprehension development J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-13 Songqiao Xie, Chunyan He
This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s (age 3–7) comprehension development of novel and conventional metonymy, combining online and offline methods. Both online and offline data show significantly better performances from the oldest group (6-to-7-year-old) and a delayed acquisition of conventional metonymy compared with novel metonymy. However, part of offline data shows no significant
-
Is home environment predictive of early grammar development? J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-13 Michelle Jennifer White, Frenette Southwood
Research shows that children’s home environment (e.g., the composition of their household and the resources available in it) has an impact on children’s language development. However, this research has mostly been conducted among English speakers from the minority world and has often only considered vocabulary size. This exploratory study investigated whether home environment factors are predictive
-
Maternal parenting style and self-regulatory private speech content use in preschool children J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-13 Kendall Wall, Aisling Mulvihill, Natasha Matthews, Paul E. Dux, Annemaree Carroll
Private speech is a tool through which children self-regulate. The regulatory content of children’s overt private speech is associated with response to task difficulty and task performance. Parenting is proposed to play a role in the development of private speech as co-regulatory interactions become represented by the child as private speech to regulate thinking and behaviour. This study investigated
-
The role of early temperament on oral language development of New Zealand children speaking Mandarin or Cantonese J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-13 Yuxin Zhang, Elaine Ballard, Taiying Lee, Henrietta Lee, Johanna Schmidt, Elaine Reese
This study investigated the role of temperament in oral language development in over 200 Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in the Growing Up in New Zealand pre-birth longitudinal cohort study. Mothers assessed infant temperament at nine months using a five-factor Infant Behaviour Questionnaire-Revised Very Short Form. They also reported on children’s vocabulary and word combinations at age two using
-
Frequency, redundancy, and context in bilingual acquisition J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-12 Paul Ibbotson, Stefan Hartmann, Nikolas Koch, Antje Endesfelder Quick
We report findings from a corpus-based investigation of three young children growing up in German-English bilingual environments (M = 3;0, Range = 2;3–3;11). Based on 2,146,179 single words and two-word combinations in naturalistic child speech (CS) and child-directed speech (CDS), we assessed the degree to which the frequency distribution of CDS predicted CS usage over time, and systematically identified
-
Maternal input, not transient elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, predicts 2-year-olds’ vocabulary development J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-12 Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ruth Brookman, Marina Kalashnikova, Kerry-Ann Grant, Denis Burnham, Katherine Demuth
Both the quantity and quality of the maternal language input are important for early language development. However, depression and anxiety can negatively impact mothers’ engagement with their infants and their infants’ expressive language abilities. Australian mother-infant dyads (N = 30) participated in a longitudinal study examining the effect of maternal language input when infants were 24 and 30
-
Remote collection of language samples from three-year-olds J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-12 Jinyoung Jo, Megha Sundara
We characterised language samples collected remotely from typically developing three-year-olds by comparing them against independent language samples collected in person from age-matched peers with and without language delays. Forty-eight typically developing, English-learning three-year-olds were administered a picture description task via Zoom. The in-person comparison groups were two sets of independent
-
The Relationship between Parenting Styles, Child’s Gender, and Gender-Shift Use in Arabic Child-Directed Speech J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-12-02 Reem Khamis Dakwar, Gubair Tarabeh
This study investigates the interrelationship between gender-shift in child-directed speech (CDS), child gender, and parenting styles among Arabic-speaking caregivers. A survey of 180 Palestinian parents assessed their parenting styles and reported use of gender-shift in relation to their child’s gender. The findings reveal no significant correlation between gender-shift and child’s gender. However
-
Sources of children’s difficulties with non-canonical sentence structures: Insights from Mandarin J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-11-27 Jiuzhou Hao, Vasiliki Chondrogianni, Patrick Sturt
The present study investigated whether children’s difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin non-canonical structures with differing word orders and the
-
The impact of internal and external factors across language domains and features in sequential bilingual acquisition J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-11-21 Susan Logue, Christina Sevdali, Raffaella Folli, Juliana Gerard
Factors which impact bilingual language development can often interact with different language features. The current study teases apart the impact of internal and external factors (chronological age, length of exposure, L2 richness, L2 use at home, maternal education and maternal L2 proficiency) across linguistic domains and features (vocabulary, morphology and syntax). Participants were 40 Arabic-speaking
-
Children’s reliance on pointing and mutual exclusivity in word-referent mapping: The role of vocabulary and language exposure J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-11-15 Myrna Falkeisen, Josje Verhagen
This study explored monolingual and multilingual two- to five-year-olds’ reliance on a non-verbal and a verbal cue during word-referent mapping, in relation to vocabulary knowledge and, for the multilinguals, Dutch language exposure. Ninety monolingual and sixty-seven multilingual children performed a referential conflict experiment that pitted a non-verbal (pointing) cue and a verbal (mutual exclusivity)
-
Argument ordering in simple sentences is affected by age of first language acquisition: Evidence from late first language signers of ASL J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-11-08 Rachel Miles, Marla Hatrak, Deniz İlkbaşaran, Rachel Mayberry
Research on the language acquisition of deaf individuals who are exposed to accessible linguistic input at a variety of ages has provided evidence for a sensitive period of first language acquisition. Recent studies have shown that deaf individuals who first learn language after early childhood, late first-language learners (LL1), do not comprehend reversible Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentences. The
-
Exploring the relations between teachers’ high-quality language features and preschoolers and kindergarteners’ vocabulary learning J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-11-08 JeanMarie Farrow, Barbara A. Wasik, Annemarie H. Hindman
This study explored the use of sophisticated vocabulary, complex syntax, and decontextualized language (including book information, conceptual information, past/future experiences, and vocabulary information) in teachers’ instructional interactions with children during the literacy block in prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. The sample included 33 teachers and 421 children. We examined correlations
-
Do children treat adjectives and nouns differently as modifiers in prenominal position? J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-11-06 Gail Moroschan, Elena Nicoladis, Farzaneh Anjomshoae
Usage-based theories of children’s syntactic acquisition (e.g., Tomasello, 2000a) predict that children’s abstract lexical categories emerge from their experience with particular words in constructions in their input. Because modifiers in English are almost always prenominal, children might initially treat adjectives similarly to nouns when used in a prenominal position. In this study, we taught English-speaking
-
Living the first years in a pandemic: children’s linguistic development and related factors in and out of the COVID-19 lockdowns J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-10-28 Irene Cadime, Ana Lúcia Santos, Iolanda Ribeiro, Fernanda Leopoldina Viana, María Teresa Martín-Aragoneses
This retrospective study provides insights on linguistic development in exceptional circumstances assessing 378 children (between 2;6 and 3;6) who lived their first years during the COVID-19 pandemic and comparing it with normative data collected before this period (CDI-III-PT; Cadime et al., 2021). It investigates the extent to which linguistic development was modulated by a complex set of factors
-
Referential transparency of verbs in child-directed input by Japanese and American caregivers J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-10-24 Allison Fitch, Amy M. Lieberman, Michael C. Frank, Jessica Brough, Matthew Valleau, Sudha Arunachalam
Children acquiring Japanese differ from those acquiring English with regard to the rate at which verbs are learned (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993). One possible explanation is that Japanese caregivers use verbs in referentially transparent contexts, which facilitate the form-meaning link. We examined this hypothesis by assessing differences in verb usage by Japanese and American caregivers during dyadic
-
Syntactic priming as implicit learning in German child language J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-10-17 Michelle Tafuri, Katherine Messenger
We investigated syntactic priming in German children to explore crosslinguistic evidence for implicit learning accounts of language production and acquisition. Adult descriptions confirmed that German speakers (N=27) preferred to spontaneously produce active versus passive transitive and DO versus PO dative forms. We tested whether German-speaking children (N=29, M age =5.3, 15 girls/14 boys) could
-
Predictors of sentence recall performance in children with and without DLD: Complexity matters J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-10-16 Janet L. McDonald, Janna B. Oetting
Using archival data from 106 children with and without DLD who spoke two dialects of English, we examined the independent contributions of vocabulary, morphological ability, phonological short term memory (pSTM), and verbal working memory (WM) to exact sentence recall, ungrammatical repetition, and incorrect tense production. For exact repetitions on simpler sentences, performance of the DLD group
-
Frequency, perceptual salience, and semantic complexity: The acquisition of possessor inflection in Northern East Cree J. Child Lang. (IF 1.7) Pub Date : 2024-10-15 Ryan E. Henke
This paper engages longstanding questions regarding how children acquire morphology in polysynthetic languages. It examines the roles of frequency, perceptual salience, and semantic complexity for morphemes in the acquisition of Northern East Cree possessive inflection, where prefixes and suffixes interact to encode possessors. Two studies analyze naturalistic video recordings of one adult and two