-
Impact of talker variability on language development in two-year-olds J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Jing Zhao, Tessei Kobayashi, Etsuko Haryu
This research investigated the impact of the number of talkers with whom children engage in daily conversation on their language development. Two surveys were conducted in 2020, targeting two-year-olds growing up in Japanese monolingual families. Caregivers reported the number of talkers in three age groups and children’s productive vocabulary via questionnaires. The results demonstrated significant
-
Internal state language factor structure and development in toddlerhood: Insights from WordBank J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Tyler C. McFayden, Madeleine Bruce
Internal state language (ISL) research contains knowledge gaps, including dimensionality and predictors of growth, addressed here in a two-aim study. Parent-reported expressive language from N = 6,373 monolingual, English-speaking toddlers (Mage = 23.5mos, 46% male, 57% white) was collected using cross-sectional and longitudinal data in WordBank. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggested
-
Adapting language development research paradigms to online testing: Data from preferential looking, word learning and vocabulary assessment in toddlers J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Delphine K-L. NGUYEN, Nadine FITZPATRICK, Caroline FLOCCIA
During the recent pandemic, it became necessary to adapt lab-based studies to online experiments. To investigate the impact of online testing on the quality of data, we focus on three paradigms widely used in infant research: a word recognition task using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, a word learning task using the Switch task, and a language assessment tool (WinG) where children identify
-
The everyday speech environments of preschoolers with and without cochlear implants J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Margaret CYCHOSZ, Jan R. EDWARDS, Benjamin MUNSON, Rachel ROMEO, Jessica KOSIE, Rochelle S. NEWMAN
Children who receive cochlear implants develop spoken language on a protracted timescale. The home environment facilitates speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the environment differs between children with cochlear implants and typical hearing. We matched eighteen preschoolers with implants (31-65 months) to two groups of children with typical hearing: by chronological age
-
Mean Length of Utterance: A study of early language development in four Southern Bantu languages J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Heather BROOKES, Patricia MAKAURE, Sefela YALALA, Hannah DANVERS, Martin MÖSSMER, Francesca LITTLE, Mikateko NDHAMBI, Frenette SOUTHWOOD, Babalwa LUDIDI, The South African CDI Team
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) has been widely used to measure children’s early language development in a variety of languages. This study investigates the utility of MLU to measure language development in four agglutinative and morphologically complex Southern Bantu languages. Using a variant of MLU, MLU3, based on the three longest sentences children produced, we analysed the utterances of 448 toddlers
-
Same name, different representational levels? Misalignment of indirect parent-reported and direct alternative forced choice measures of emotion word comprehension in preschool children J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Ida Torp ROEPSTORFF, Julien MAYOR, Sophie S. HAVIGHURST, Natalia KARTUSHINA
This study assessed the relationship between preschoolers’ directly and indirectly assessed emotion word comprehension. Forty-nine two-to-five-year-old Norwegian children were assessed in a tablet-based 4-alternative forced choice (AFC) task on their comprehension of six basic and six complex emotions using facial expression photographs. Parents reported emotion word comprehension and production of
-
Preschool children’s discourse competence in different genres and how it relates to iconic gestures J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Friederike KERN, Ulrich BODEN, Anne NEMETH, Sofia KOUTALIDIS, Olga ABRAMOV, Stefan KOPP, Katharina J. ROHLFING
Based on the linguistic analysis of game explanations and retellings, the paper’s goal is to investigate the relation of preschool children’s situated discourse competence and iconic gestures in different communicative genres, focussing on reinforcing and supplementary speech-gesture-combinations. To this end, a method was developed to evaluate discourse competence as a context-sensitive and interactively
-
Current practices of Portuguese speech-language pathologists with preschool-age children with pragmatic impairment: A cross-sectional survey J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Tatiana PEREIRA, Ana Margarida RAMALHO, Marisa LOUSADA
This study aims to investigate the practice patterns used by Portuguese speech-language pathologists (SLPs) with preschool-age children with pragmatic impairment and to identify the actual need(s) perceived by SLPs in this field. A total of 351 SLPs responded. The results reveal that 81.5 per cent of the respondents (n=286) reported working or had previously worked with preschool-age children with
-
The acquisition of the semantics of Japanese numeral classifiers: The methodological value of nonsense J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Maki KUBOTA, Yuko MATSUOKA, Jason ROTHMAN
This study examined the acquisition of numeral classifiers in 120 monolingual Japanese children. Previous research has argued that the complex semantic system underlying classifiers is late acquired. Thus, we set out to determine the age at which Japanese children are able to extend the semantic properties of classifiers to novel items/situations. Participants completed a comprehension task with a
-
Novel word learning ability in 24-month-olds: The interactive role of mother’s work status and education level J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Rong HUANG, Tianlin WANG
Using both online and offline measures, this study investigates how maternal education and work status (stay-at-home, part-time, full-time) are jointly associated with infants’ word learning ability and vocabulary size. One hundred 24-month-old infants completed a lab-based mutual exclusivity task, which assesses infants’ novel word learning ability. Caregivers reported infants’ productive vocabulary
-
Fostering retention of word learning: The number of training sessions children retrieve words positively relates to post-training retention J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Katherine R. GORDON, Stephanie L. LOWRY
During vocabulary instruction, it is important to teach words until their representations are robust enough to be retained. For adults, the number of training sessions a target item is successfully retrieved during training predicts the likelihood of post-training retention. To assess this relationship in children, we reanalyzed data from Gordon et al. (2021b, 2022). Four- to six-year-old children
-
An observational study of parental language during play and mealtime in toddlers at variable likelihood for autism J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Kelsey THOMPSON, Elizabeth CHOI, Jonet ARTIS, Michaela DUBAY, Grace T. BARANEK, Linda R. WATSON
Parental language input influences child language outcomes but may vary based on certain characteristics. This research examined how parental language differs during two contexts for toddlers at varying likelihood of autism based on their developmental skills. Parental language (quantity, quality, and pragmatic functions) was analyzed during dyadic play and mealtime interactions as a secondary data
-
Metaphor comprehension in the acquisition of Arabic J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Alaa ALMOHAMMADI, Dorota Katarzyna GASKINS, Gabriella RUNDBLAD
Metaphors are key to how children conceptualise the world around them and how they engage socially and educationally. This study investigated metaphor comprehension in typically developing Arabic-speaking children aged 3;01-6;07. Eighty-seven children were administered a newly developed task containing 20 narrated stories and were asked to point at pictures that best illustrated the metaphoric expression
-
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on multilingual families in the Netherlands J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Sharon UNSWORTH, Marieke VAN DEN AKKER, Caya VAN DIJK
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, public life in many countries ground to a halt in early 2020. The aims of this study were (i) to uncover the language practices of multilingual families during the pandemic, in general and especially regarding homeschooling; and (ii) to determine to what extent the changes in circumstance caused by the pandemic impacted children’s language use and proficiency,
-
The distributional and embodied contexts of verbs in caregiver-infant interactions J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Vivian Hanwen ZHANG, Lucas M. CHANG, Gedeon O. DEÁK
The process by which infants learn verbs through daily social interactions is not well-understood. This study investigated caregivers’ use of verbs, which have highly abstract meanings, during unscripted toy-play. We examined how verbs co-occurred with distributional and embodied factors including pronouns, caregivers’ manual actions, and infants’ locomotion, gaze, and object-touching. Object-action
-
Processing adjectives in development: Evidence from eye-tracking J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Michela REDOLFI, Chiara MELLONI
Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated
-
The role of imageability in noun and verb acquisition in children with Down syndrome and their peers with typical development J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Miguel GALEOTE, Natalia ARIAS-TREJO, Armando Q. ANGULO-CHAVIRA, Elena CHECA
Our main objective was to analyze the role of imageability in relation to the age of acquisition (AoA) of nouns and verbs in Spanish-speaking children with Down syndrome (DS) and their peers with typical development (TD). The AoA of nouns and verbs was determined using the MacArthur-Bates CDIs adapted to the profile of children with DS. The AoA was analyzed using a linear mixed-effect model, including
-
Cognates are advantaged over non-cognates in early bilingual expressive vocabulary development J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Lori MITCHELL, Rachel Ka-Ying TSUI, Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN
Bilinguals need to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and those that also sound similar (e.g., banana–banane) are called cognates. Research has consistently shown that children and adults process and name cognates more easily than non-cognates. The present study explored if there is such an advantage for cognate production in bilinguals’ early vocabulary
-
Exploring early syntactic generalisation: evidence from a growth curve analysis of Spanish “se” constructions J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Nick RICHES
Children’s early grammatical constructions, e.g., SVO, exhibit a learning curve with cumulative verb types (CVT) increasing exponentially. According to Ninio (2006), the fact that learning curves, though nonlinear, can be modelled by a continuous regression suggests instant generalisation. Moreover, differences in initial verbs across children indicate minimal involvement of semantics. This study tested
-
Time after time: Factors influencing children’s comprehension of Before and After J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Laura WAGNER, Rachael Frush HOLT
We investigated older children’s (7–12 years) ability to comprehend before and after sentences. Results found that three factors that influence pre-school aged children’s learning of these words continues to influence older children’s comprehension. Specifically, children’s accuracy is improved when the events can be naturally (vs. arbitrarily) ordered; when the clauses in the sentence iconically match
-
Comprehension and processing of the universal quantifier in children, adolescents and adults J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Utako MINAI, Kiwako ITO, Adam ROYER
Quantifier spreading (Q-spreading), children’s incorrect falsification of a universally-quantified sentence based on an ‘extra-object’ picture, may persist beyond childhood, and children adhere to Q-spreading without changing responses throughout testing. We examined the error patterns across wider age groups (aged 4-79) with a picture-sentence verification eye-tracking task. We also examined whether
-
Hablando at home: Examining the interactional resources of a bilingual autistic child J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-10-30 S. R. COHEN, A. WISHARD GUERRA, J. MIGUEL, K. BOTTEMA-BEUTEL, G. OLIVEIRA
Daily language interactions predict child outcomes. For multilingual families who rear neurodiverse children and who may be minoritized for their language use, a dearth of research examines families’ daily language interactions. Utilizing a language socialization framework and a case study methodology, 4,991 English and Spanish utterances from a 5-year old autistic child and his family were collected
-
No concurrent correlations between parental mental state talk and toddlers’ language abilities J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Sandra NYBERG, Örjan DAHLSTRÖM, Daniel VOINIER, Kerstin BERGSTRÖM, Mikael HEIMANN
Mental State Talk (MST) is utterances describing invisible mental aspects. The first aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of Parental MST and Child MST and their concurrent association in a Swedish population, and the second aim was to relate these MST measures to the children’s general language abilities. Seventy-seven dyads of parents and their 25-month-old toddlers participated
-
Acquisition of the feature [+spread glottis] in Icelandic J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Thora MÁSDÓTTIR, Barbara May BERNHARDT, Joseph Paul STEMBERGER, Gunnar Ólafur HANSSON
The feature [+spread glottis] ([+s.g.]) denotes that a speech sound is produced with a wide glottal aperture with audible voiceless airflow. Icelandic is unusual in the degree to which [+spread glottis] is involved in the phonology: in /h/, pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops, voiceless fricatives and voiceless sonorants. The ubiquitousness of the feature could potentially affect the rate and process
-
Revisiting frequencies of phonological sound classes in speech input: Change over time in child-directed speech J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Sue Ann S. LEE, Jaehoon LEE, Barbara L. DAVIS
The purpose of the current study was to revisit a controversial topic: whether frequencies of phonological consonant and vowel classes differ in speech directed to children and to adults. In addition, the current study investigated whether the frequency of phonological consonant and vowel classes changes with children’s increasing chronological and/or developmental age. This study analyzed speech input
-
The observation of superiority on multiple movements to the Italian left-periphery: Intervention effects on nested dependencies and the role of information-structure features J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Vincenzo MOSCATI
Young Romance speakers can structure their sentences by dislocating multiple constituents to the left periphery, resulting in non-canonical word orders. Production data, however, show that this ordering is rigid: only SOV sequences are attested, an observation reminiscent of Superiority. The first goal of the paper is to replicate this observation in comprehension; the second is to derive the Subject-over-Object
-
The Development of Abstract Word Meanings J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Emiko J. MURAKI, Lorraine D. REGGIN, Carissa Y. FEDDEMA, Penny M. PEXMAN
Extensive research has shown that children’s early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with age-of-acquisition data from large-scale vocabulary testing with
-
Socio-economic status and other potential risk factors for language development in the first year of life J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Sarah J. DER NEDERLANDEN, Jeannette C. SCHAEFFER, Hedwig H. J. A. VAN BAKEL, Evelien DIRKS
A wide variety of language skills has been shown to be compromised in children from low socioeconomic status (SES). However, few studies have investigated the effect of SES on language development in infants. The aim of this study is two-fold: to investigate when the first SES-effects on language can be observed and to explore the effects of three variables often claimed to be linked to SES – gestational
-
Phonological Variation in Child-Directed Speech is Modulated by Lexical Frequency J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-09-22 Eon-Suk KO, Jongho JUN
We investigate whether child-directed speech (CDS) contains a higher proportion of canonical pronunciations compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), focusing on Korean noun stem-final obstruent variation. In a word-teaching task, we observed that mothers use a higher rate of canonical pronunciation when addressing infants than when addressing adults. In a follow-up experiment, adults exhibited a higher
-
Mothers’ and fathers’ infant-directed speech have similar acoustic properties, but these are not associated with direct or indirect measures of word comprehension in 8-month-old infants J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Audun ROSSLUND, Silje HAGELUND, Julien MAYOR, Natalia KARTUSHINA
Previous research on infant-directed speech (IDS) and its role in infants’ language development has largely focused on mothers, with fathers being investigated scarcely. Here we examine the acoustics of IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in Norwegian mothers and fathers to 8-month-old infants, and whether these relate to direct (eye-tracking) and indirect (parental report) measures of infants’
-
Processing of noun plural marking in German-speaking children: an eye-tracking study J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Bénédicte GRANDON, Marcel SCHLECHTWEG, Esther RUIGENDIJK
The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old children use the phonetic, phonological, and morphological
-
How reliable is assessment of children’s sentence comprehension using a self-directed app? A comparison of supported versus independent use J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Pauline FRIZELLE, Ana BUCKLEY, Tricia BIANCONE, Anna CERONI, Darren DAHLY, Paul FLETCHER, Dorothy V. M. BISHOP, Cristina MCKEAN
This study reports on the feasibility of using the Test of Complex Syntax- Electronic (TECS-E), as a self-directed app, to measure sentence comprehension in children aged 4 to 5 ½ years old; how testing apps might be adapted for effective independent use; and agreement levels between face-to-face supported computerized and independent computerized testing with this cohort. A pilot phase was completed
-
Word segmentation from transcriptions of child-directed speech using lexical and sub-lexical cues J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Zébulon GORIELY, Andrew CAINES, Paula BUTTERY
We compare two frameworks for the segmentation of words in child-directed speech, PHOCUS and MULTICUE. PHOCUS is driven by lexical recognition, whereas MULTICUE combines sub-lexical properties to make boundary decisions, representing differing views of speech processing. We replicate these frameworks, perform novel benchmarking and confirm that both achieve competitive results. We develop a new framework
-
Parental use of causal language for preterm and full-term children: A longitudinal study J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Salih C. ÖZDEMİR, Aslı AKTAN-ERCİYES, Tilbe GÖKSUN
Parents are often a good source of information, introducing children to how the world around them is described and explained in terms of cause-and-effect relations. Parents also vary in their speech, and these variations can predict children’s later language skills. Being born preterm might be related to such parent-child interactions. The present longitudinal study investigated parental causal language
-
Comprehension of indirect answers: Developmental trajectory for preschool- and early elementary school-aged children with typical development J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Timothy HUANG, Lizbeth H. FINESTACK
Indirect answers are a common type of non-literal language that do not provide an explicit “yes” or “no” to a question (e.g., “I have to work late” indirectly answered “Are you going to the party?” with a negative response). In the current study, we examined the developmental trajectory of comprehension of indirect answers among 5- to 10-year-old children with typical development. Forty-eight children
-
Computational modelling of language acquisition: an introduction J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Titia BENDERS, Elma BLOM
One approach to studying how children acquire language is to simulate language acquisition through computational modelling. Computational models implement theories of language acquisition and simulation outcomes can then be tested against existing real-world data or in new empirical research. It is more than ten years ago that Journal of Child Language published a special issue on the topic, edited
-
Stop contrast acquisition in child Kriol: Evidence of stable transmission of phonology post Creole formation J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Rikke L. BUNDGAARD-NIELSEN, Brett J. BAKER, Elise A. BELL, Yizhou WANG
Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents (Sandefur, 1986). A language, such as Kriol, characterised
-
Developmental differences in reported speech and internal state language in preschoolers’ personal narratives J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Megan E. WELLIVER, Alice J. DAVIDSON, Alexandra MCCRARY
The present study explored developmental differences in preschoolers’ use of reported speech and internal state language in personal narratives. Three-, four-, and five-year-olds attending a laboratory preschool shared 204 stories about ‘a time when you were happy/sad’. Stories were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded for reported speech (direct, indirect, narrativized) and internal state language
-
“Mom said it in quotation marks!” Irony comprehension and metapragmatic awareness in 8-year-olds J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Sarah GARFINKEL, Meredith L. ROWE, Sandra BOSACKI, Natalia BANASIK-JEMIELNIAK
This study investigated links between the development of children’s understanding of ironic comments and their metapragmatic knowledge. Forty-six 8-year-olds completed the short version of the Irony Comprehension Task, during which they were presented with ironic comments in three stories and asked to provide reasons for why the speaker in a story uttered an ironic comment. We coded their responses
-
Structure and acoustics of the speech of verbal autistic preschoolers J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Pauline MAES, Marielle WEYLAND, Mikhail KISSINE
In this study, we report an extensive investigation of the structural language and acoustical specificities of the spontaneous speech of ten three- to five-year-old verbal autistic children. The autistic children were compared to a group of ten typically developing children matched pairwise on chronological age, nonverbal IQ and socioeconomic status, and groupwise on verbal IQ and gender on various
-
Twenty-month-olds categorically discriminate similar sounding vowels regardless of vocabulary level, an event related potentials (ERP) study J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Ao CHEN
The current study investigated whether vocabulary relates to phonetic categorization at neural level in early childhood. Electoencephalogram (EEG) responses were collected from 53 Dutch 20-month-old children in a passive oddball paradigm, in which they were presented with two nonwords “giep” [ɣip] and “gip” [ɣɪp] that were contrasted solely by the vowel. In the multiple-speaker condition, both nonwords
-
Profiles of word-finding difficulties in school-aged children J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-06 Vincent BOURASSA BÉDARD, Natacha TRUDEAU, Andrea A. N. MACLEOD
Current understanding of word-finding (WF) difficulties in children and their underlying language processing deficit is poor. Authors have proposed that different underlying deficits may result in different profiles. The current study aimed to better understand WF difficulties by identifying difficult tasks for children with WF difficulties and by focusing on semantic vs. phonological profiles. Twenty-four
-
Development of communicative-pragmatic abilities in children with early cochlear implants J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Alberto PAROLA, Dize HILVIU, Sara VIVALDO, Andrea MARINI, Diego DI LISI, Patrizia CONSOLINO, Francesca Marina BOSCO
Cochlear Implants (CIs) enhance linguistic skills in deaf or hard of hearing children (D/HH). However, the benefits of CIs have not been sufficiently studied, especially with regard to communicative-pragmatics, i.e., the ability to communicate appropriately in a specific context using different expressive means, such as language and extralinguistic or paralinguistic cues. The study aimed to assess
-
Frequent vs. infrequent words shape toddlers’ real-time sentence comprehension J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Christine E. POTTER, Casey LEW-WILLIAMS
We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children’s real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames (Look at the… vs. Examine the…), followed by nouns that were higher- or lower-frequency labels for a referent (horse vs. pony). Toddlers showed
-
Positive Valence Contributes to Hyperarticulation in Maternal Speech to Infants and Puppies J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-07-01 Robin PANNETON, Alejandrina CRISTIA, Caroline TAYLOR, Christine MOON
Infant-directed speech often has hyperarticulated features, such as point vowels whose formants are further apart than in adult-directed speech. This increased “vowel space” may reflect the caretaker’s effort to speak more clearly to infants, thus benefiting language processing. However, hyperarticulation may also result from more positive valence (e.g., speaking with positive vocal emotion) often
-
Acoustic cues to phrase and clause boundaries in infant-directed speech: Evidence from LENA recordings J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-24 Tianlin WANG, Elie ChingYen YU, Rong HUANG, Jill LANY
Infant-directed speech (IDS) produced in laboratory settings contains acoustic cues, such as pauses, pitch changes, and vowel-lengthening that could facilitate breaking speech into smaller units, such as syntactically well-formed utterances, and the noun- and verb-phrases within them. It is unclear whether these cues are present in speech produced in more natural contexts outside the lab. We captured
-
Use of pointing in parent-child interactions by hearing children of deaf and hearing parents: A follow-up from 1- to 3-years of age J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Laura KANTO, Minna LAAKSO, Kerttu HUTTUNEN
Pointing plays a significant role in communication and language development. However, in spoken languages pointing has been viewed as a non-verbal gesture, whereas in sign languages, pointing is regarded to represent a linguistic unit of language. This study compared the use of pointing between seven bilingual hearing children of deaf parents (Kids of Deaf Adults [KODAs]) interacting with their deaf
-
Structural complexity reduction in English–French bilingual children’s event encoding J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Helen ENGEMANN
Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this language-specific difference in English–French bilingual
-
The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA): A validation study with Italian-learning children J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Tamara BASTIANELLO, Irene LORENZINI, Thierry NAZZI, Marinella MAJORANO
This study is a validation of the LENA system for the Italian language. In Study 1, to test LENA’s accuracy, seventy-two 10-minute samples extracted from daylong LENA recordings were manually transcribed for 12 children longitudinally observed at 1;0 and 2;0. We found strong correlations between LENA and human estimates in the number of Adult Word Count (AWC) and Child Vocalisations Count (CVC) and
-
Leveraging language specific information J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Laura WAGNER
Meaning comes in different shapes and sizes. Content words like parrot and persimmon and perambulate convey some important – and very specific – kinds of meanings. But the kinds of meaning that syntactic structures encode are of a different sort. They are more general and abstract than those kinds of words, and they are linked to the underlying organization of language. The essential insight behind
-
How does linguistic context influence word learning? J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Raquel G. ALHAMA, Caroline F. ROWLAND, Evan KIDD
While there are well-known demonstrations that children can use distributional information to acquire multiple components of language, the underpinnings of these achievements are unclear. In the current paper, we investigate the potential pre-requisites for a distributional learning model that can explain how children learn their first words. We review existing literature and then present the results
-
Neurocomputational modeling of speech motor development J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Andrew M. MEIER, Frank H. GUENTHER
This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases or sentences. We describe the DIVA model of speech
-
Building on cultural and linguistic strengths and recognizing life challenges - a commentary on Paradis’ “Sources of individual differences in the dual language development of heritage bilinguals” J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Carol Scheffner HAMMER
Children growing up bilingually are often treated as a monolithic group; however, heritage language (HL) bilinguals constitute an extremely heterogenous group that vary due to a wide variety of factors. In her keynote, Paradis provides a thought-provoking analysis of the research literature and identifies key internal and external factors that lead to individual differences. Specifically, she identifies
-
Computational cognitive modeling for syntactic acquisition: Approaches that integrate information from multiple places J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Lisa PEARL
Computational cognitive modeling is a tool we can use to evaluate theories of syntactic acquisition. Here, I review several models implementing theories that integrate information from both linguistic and non-linguistic sources to learn different types of syntactic knowledge. Some of these models additionally consider the impact of factors coming from children’s developing non-linguistic cognition
-
Vowels and consonants matter equally to British English-learning 11-month-olds’ familiar word form recognition J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Paul RATNAGE, Thierry NAZZI, Caroline FLOCCIA
While adult studies show that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies cross-linguistically. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants’ recognition of familiar word forms is more reliant on consonants than vowels, as found by Poltrock and Nazzi (2015) in French. After establishing
-
Realistic and broad-scope learning simulations: first results and challenges J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Maureen de SEYSSEL, Marvin LAVECHIN, Emmanuel DUPOUX
There is a current ‘theory crisis’ in language acquisition research, resulting from fragmentation both at the level of the approaches and the linguistic level studied. We identify a need for integrative approaches that go beyond these limitations, and propose to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of current theoretical approaches of language acquisition. In particular, we advocate that language learning
-
Children’s acquisition of word order variation: A study of subject placement in embedded clauses in Norwegian J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Tina RINGSTAD, Marit WESTERGAARD
Norwegian embedded clauses give children two options for subject placement: preceding or following negation (S-Neg/Neg-S). In the adult language, S-Neg is the ‘default’ and highly frequent option, and Neg-S is infrequent in children’s input. However, Neg-S may be argued to be the structurally less complex. We investigate whether children are aware of the existence of both subject positions, and if
-
The acquisition of English modal constructions: a corpus-based analysis J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Kimberley BELL, Silke BRANDT, Elena LIEVEN, Anna THEAKSTON
The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4. We examined the influence
-
The acquisition of sign languages in rural contexts – what can we do when samples will always be ‘too small’? J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Hannah LUTZENBERGER
Our knowledge and theories about language acquisition are skewed towards urban languages, and primarily English (Kidd & Garcia, 2022). Cristia and colleagues convincingly show that studies on the acquisition of rural languages are scarce. The authors suggest that in rural settings, combining experimental and observational approaches is critical to testing and sharpening our theories about language
-
So many variables, but what causes what? J. Child Lang. (IF 2.701) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Cécile DE CAT, Sharon UNSWORTH
Paradis’ keynote article provides a comprehensive overview of factors influencing bilingual children’s dual language abilities. It includes the ‘usual suspects’, such as input quantity, and also highlights areas requiring further investigation, such as cognitive abilities. As such, it will no doubt serve as a valuable basis for the field as we move forward. Paradis quite rightly points out that whilst