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A prosodic account of complex predicate acquisition in Mam: A Mayan language First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-03-09 Clifton Pye
The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children’s ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of language development. The ubiquity of complex predicates
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The acquisition of directionals in Q’anjob’al First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Pedro Mateo Pedro
This article evaluates the acquisition of directionals in Q’anjob’al, a Western Mayan language of Guatemala. The data come from a longitudinal study of two Q’anjob’al monolingual children of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala: Xhuw (1;9–2;5) and Xhim (2;3–3;5). The results show how these children acquire the morphological distribution of motion verbs and directionals in Q’anjob’al. They produce
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Fine motor skills and their link to receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, and narrative language skills First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-02-24 Rebecca E. Winter, Heidrun Stoeger, Sebastian P. Suggate
A growing body of research suggests that fine motor skills (FMS) are associated with language development. In this study, we examined 76 children aged 3–6 years assessing the link between language and FMS. Specific measures included receptive and expressive vocabulary, oral narrative skills, and various fine motor tasks. Hierarchical linear regressions revealed that FMS predicted receptive and expressive
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On the universality of the subject preference in the acquisition of relative clauses across languages First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Nozomi Tanaka, Elaine Lau, Alan L. F. Lee
Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this meta-analysis follows an established and rigorous scientific method
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Quantifying events or entities?—A corpus-based study of universal quantifiers in early child English and child-directed speech First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Xiangjun Deng, Xiaobei Zheng, Haoyan Ge
The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers all, every, and each in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic observation of 10 English-speaking children and their caregivers. We found that the use of these
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Giving oranges and puppies: Children’s production of directional verbs in an emerging sign language from Oaxaca First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Lynn Hou
Children’s acquisition of directional verbs in sign languages has received a lot of attention, but less is known about the sociocultural process of using these verbs, especially in the context of emerging sign languages in diverse language ecologies. Directional verbs are a common grammatical phenomenon of many sign languages in which some verbs such as ‘to give’ and ‘to take’ can move in the direction
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Preschool Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of associative anaphora First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Yuan Xie, Peng Zhou
Associative anaphora refers to a discourse operation that links a definite determiner phrase (DP) to an antecedent that acts as an indirect referent of the definite DP. For example, in the sequence ‘I bought a laptop. The keyboard was black’, the definite DP ‘the keyboard’ is linked to ‘a laptop’, meaning ‘the keyboard of the laptop’. The development of children’s knowledge of associative anaphora
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Examining linguistic and discourse features in oral text production and their dimensionality First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-01-13 Minkyung Cho, Young-Suk Grace Kim
Examining the dimensionality of oral discourse language skills in early childhood is crucial in informing theories of language and literacy development. This study examined the factor structure of linguistic and discourse features in oral text production for second graders. A total of 330 English-speaking second graders ( Mage = 7.33, 53% boys, 55% White) described three pictures in two discourse conditions
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Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Marisa Casillas, Ruthe Foushee, Juan Méndez Girón, Gilles Polian, Penelope Brown
This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias – an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children’s early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for
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Thought and language: association of groupmindedness with young English-speaking children’s production of pronouns First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Jared Vasil, Charlotte Moore, Michael Tomasello
Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is det...
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Internal consistency and concurrent validity of the parental report instrument on language in pre-school-aged children – The Finnish Communicative Development Inventory III First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Suvi Stolt
Few studies provide information on the reliability and validity of parental report instruments when assessing the language skills of pre-school–aged children. This study investigates the internal c...
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Development of sensitivity to beat gesture and contrastive accenting in support of word learning in early childhood in boys and girls First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Laura M. Morett, Cailee M. Nelson, Sarah S. Hughes-Berheim, Jason Scofield
This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in li...
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Clinicopathologic features in childhood-onset lupus nephritis with antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody positivity——a multi-center retrospective study First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Bei Jin, Cheng Cheng, Meizhen Tan, Jun Huang, Lizhi Chen, Zhilang Lin, Shuhan Zeng, Zihua Yu, Yingjie Li, Xiaoyun Jiang
BackgroundPositive antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA) serology in adult-onset lupus nephritis (LN) is associated with more active disease and distinct renal pathology, but data with respect...
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Social Ontology and Evaluation—A Comment on “Framing Evaluation in Reality: An Introduction to Ontologically Integrative Evaluation” First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Robert Picciotto
According to Jennifer Billman, western evaluation bias against indigenous thinking is due to ontological incompetence. If so, the solution she offers (a highly abstract list of criteria) is inadequ...
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Appropriateness of Recommendations Provided by ChatGPT to Interventional Radiologists First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Maxime Barat, Philippe Soyer, Anthony Dohan
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze the answers provided by ChatGPT to various questions in the field of interventional radiology (IR) and compare their correctness to a consensus of ...
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Posterior Cranial Distraction in Craniosynostosis: A Systematic Review of the Literature First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Ibrahim Khansa, Annie I. Drapeau, Gregory D. Pearson
ObjectivePosterior cranial distraction (PCD) is a surgical technique to address craniosynostosis, especially in syndromic patients. The technique has the ability to significantly expand the cranium...
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Gender(ed) violence in neo-authoritarian times First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Leticia Sabsay
As conservative and neo-authoritarian tendencies in Europe move across political and geo-cultural borders, we bear witness to a renewed attack on gender and sexual rights. This is a challenge to de...
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Visual negotiation of identity and settlement of Poles in the so-called Recovered Territories: East Side Story by Anne Peschken and Marek Pisarsky First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Marta Smolińska
This text is an analysis of a series of pinhole photographs, by Anne Peschken and Marek Pisarsky (Urban Art), entitled East Side Story I (Myślibórz). Photo research on migration and arrival stories...
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Walking hand in hand: The role of affection-sharing in understanding the social network effect in same-sex, mixed-sex, and gender-diverse relationships First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Karen L Blair, Chelsea Hudson, Diane Holmberg
Individuals who perceive greater support or approval for their relationships from friends and family also report greater relationship stability and commitment and better mental and physical health ...
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Words in context: Compensation for phonological assimilation in monolingual and bilingual toddlers First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Leher Singh, Qiqi Cheng
Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the...
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Exploring parent profiles in parent–child interactions with e-books First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Rosa G. Turco, Meredith L. Rowe, Joseph H. Blatt
Despite the documented rise of children’s use of mobile media devices in the United States, particularly in lower-income homes, there is limited research on how children and parents interact togeth...
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Grammatical categorization based on frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Vajiheh Omidkhoda, Ali Alizadeh, Atiyeh Kamyabi Gol
Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames a...
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Text complexity and variety factors in narrative retelling and narrative comprehension among Arabic-speaking preschool children First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Khaloob Kawar, Elinor Saiegh-Haddad, Sharon Armon-Lotem
The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex ...
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Silent Finns and Talkative Italians? An investigation of communicative differences and similarities as perceived by parents in typically developing children First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Ilaria Gabbatore, Katja Dindar, Veera Pirinen, Hannu Vähänikkilä, Laura Mämmelä, Aija Kotila, Francesca M. Bosco, Eeva Leinonen, Soile Loukusa
Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children’s daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, whi...
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Acquisition during normative code-mixing: Trinidadian children’s varilingual pronoun usage First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Samantha Jackson
While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- t...
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How the characteristics of words in child-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech to influence children’s productive vocabularies First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Gary Jones, Francesco Cabiddu, Doug J. K. Barrett, Antonio Castro, Bethany Lee
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 ...
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Morphological distance between spoken Palestinian dialect and standard Arabic and its implications for reading acquisition First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Nancy Joubran-Awadie, Yasmin Shalhoub-Awwad
When the written language that children learn to read and write is distinct from the oral language they acquired as their mother tongue, they may encounter substantial challenges. The linguistic di...
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Associations between early pre-reading and phonological skills in the light of auditory word recognition and lexical ability First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Eija Aalto, Katri Saaristo-Helin, Suvi Stolt
The association between pre-reading skills and phonological production skills has been shown at school age, but less is known about how these skills interact at an earlier age when they are just de...
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Associations of paternal factors and child’s sex with early vocabulary development – The STEPS study First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-11-08 Annette Nylund, Pirjo Korpilahti, Anne Kaljonen, Pirkko Rautakoski
In a changing society where the roles of fathers and mothers in caregiving are becoming more equal, the role of the father in early language development has also changed. We aimed to study associat...
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Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-10-01 David Price-Williams, Matt Davies
Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for input-based language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of ...
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Mothers’ and fathers’ bimodal communication in dyadic and triadic interaction with their infants First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Mara Morelli, Roberto Baiocco, Elena Cattelino, Emiddia Longobardi
Parents play an important role in children’s language development. To our knowledge, no studies have compared fathers’ and mothers’ use of gestural and verbal communication in dyadic versus triadic...
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Prompting heritage-language engagement in English-speaking Maltese families, via a family language programme intervention First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Jennifer Formosa, Sabine Little
This qualitative, exploratory research study is positioned within the field of Family Language Policy (FLP). Contextualised in bilingual Malta, where Maltese is the majority language, the study inq...
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Acquisition of Malayalam inflections: Complexity of morphosyntactic rules and its impact on developing grammars First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Gayathri G. Krishnan, Arathi Raghunathan, Vaijayanthi M. Sarma
In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech...
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Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Evan Kidd, Rowena Garcia
Our original target article highlighted some significant shortcomings in the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a handful of other Ind...
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Preschoolers’ comprehension of exhaustive focus: The role of contextualization First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-08-16 Lilla Pintér, Balázs Surányi
Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus cons...
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Children’s acquisition of negation in L1 Afrikaans First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Michelle Jennifer White, Frenette Southwood, Kate Huddlestone
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically...
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From green to turquoise: Exploring age and socioeconomic status in the acquisition of color terms First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Molly E. Scott, Junko Kanero, Noburo Saji, Yu Chen, Mutsumi Imai, Roberta M. Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek
Previous research demonstrates that children delineate more nuanced color boundaries with increased exposure to their native language. As socioeconomic status (SES) is known to correlate with diffe...
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Contextual dependency and overuse of estar in the acquisition of Spanish copula verbs First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Fraibet Aveledo, Sara Sanchez-Alonso, Maria Mercedes Piñango
The delayed acquisition of Spanish ser and estar is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the developmental trajectory including its age distribution? We examine Spanish
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The effect of tone hyperarticulation in Cantonese infant-directed speech on toddlers’ word recognition in the second year of life First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-07-14 Luchang Wang, René Kager, Patrick C. M. Wong
The acoustic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been widely studied, but whether and how young learners’ language development benefits from individual properties remains to be confirme...
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What ‘diversity’ means depends on your perspective: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Ruthe Foushee, Marisa Casillas
Having recognized the need for diversity spotlighted by Kidd and Garcia – but given that sampling all the world’s languages is infeasible – we focus on which dimensions of variability researchers s...
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A proposal for research on the acquisition of prosodic focus marking in diverse languages: A response to Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-07-07 Aoju Chen, Bhuvana Narasimhan
Kidd and Garcia demonstrate a dire lack of diversity in language acquisition research. We present a concrete proposal to improve language and area coverage in the field. Our approach outlines key questions in an understudied area, that is, prosody, methods for collecting and analyzing data, resources for training and tools, and a means to foster research collaboration and publication of crosslinguistic
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Maternal passives addressed to Japanese-speaking children: A usage-based approach First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-28 Sanako Mitsugi, Haruka Fukuda
This study examined Japanese-speaking mothers’ passives in the child-directed speech from the CHILDES database. We selected five parent–child corpora and analyzed the overall distribution of the mothers’ passives and further investigated the contribution of the construction and the passivized verbs to sentence meaning. The findings were as follows: (1) There are only a few verbs that accounted for
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The view from Hebrew: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-14 Ruth A. Berman
The commentary opens by pointing out why Kidd and Garcia’s study is an important milestone in research on child language. The commentary goes on to survey insights from crosslinguistic research in the domain, focusing on the author’s work in acquisition and development of Israeli Hebrew as a first language, from toddlers via schoolchildren to adolescents. And it calls for further research to enhance
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Child language acquisition research on indigenous African sign languages: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-14 Mary Edward
It is not always the case that an endangered language goes through a revitalisation programme. For most endangered languages, there are no attempts for revitalisation, and we may never hear of them, nor understand their child language acquisition process. Currently, our understanding of sign language acquisition by children is framed by the research on the few sign languages that have child language
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The potential for ELLECCT to support language development in the early years: A commentary on Weadman, Serry and Snow (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-11 Louisa Reeves
This commentary focuses on the English Early Years Education context and how the Emergent Literacy and Language Early Childhood Checklist for Teachers (ELLECCT Weadman, 2022) could be used in this context to emphasise the centrality of oral language in emergent literacy development. The English Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum and initiatives such as the Early Reading guide, the English Hubs
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Signed languages – Unique and ordinary: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Diane Lillo-Martin, Julie A. Hochgesang
In this commentary on the article by Kidd and Garcia, we point out that research on natural signed languages is an important component of the goal of broadening the database of knowledge about how languages are acquired. While signed languages do display some modality effects, they also have many similarities to spoken languages, both in function and in form. Thus, research on signed languages and
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How to learn more about how children learn languages: A commentary on Kidd and García (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-06 Marilyn M. Vihman
Kidd and Garcia demonstrate that the field of language acquisition must consider a more diverse range of languages. This is certainly needed, to gain a deeper understanding of the basic mechanisms of language acquisition; to achieve that, we need more longitudinal studies of several children per language, with (trained) fluent-user transcription and analysis. This could, for example, help to establish
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Language diversity and bilingual first language acquisition: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-04 Virginia Yip, Stephen Matthews
Discussing the issue of representativeness from a bilingual perspective, we address how the problem is multiplied in the case of bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). Given 7,000 languages, there are over 24 million possible language pairs that bilingual children might acquire. In current research and databases including CHILDES, English and Indo-European languages dominate: even non-Indo-European
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A longitudinal study of Estonian mothers’ self-reported language teaching practices and children’s language skills First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-04 Tiia Tulviste, Anni Tamm
This study explored associations between mothers’ language teaching practices and children’s language skills concurrently and longitudinally, while also taking into account the children’s sex and mothers’ education. Estonian mothers of 76 children reported their language teaching practices at child ages 3;0 and 4;0. Children’s language comprehension and production were measured via the examiner-administered
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Prosodic features of maternal input to children with sex chromosome trisomies First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-04 Alessandra Provera, Paola Zanchi, Gaia Silibello, Francesca Dall’Ara, Claudia Rigamonti, Federico Monti, Paola Francesca Ajmone, Faustina Lalatta, Maria Antonella Costantino, Paola Giovanna Vizziello, Laura Zampini
The neuropsychological profile associated with sex chromosome trisomies (SCT) is frequently characterised by delays or deficits in linguistic development. Although maternal input could have an important role in influencing and shaping the linguistic development of children with SCT, there is a lack of studies in the literature that have investigated its prosodic characteristics. The study aims to analyse
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Diversity in bilingual child language acquisition research: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-04 Sirada Rochanavibhata, Viorica Marian
Kidd and Garcia report that language acquisition studies are skewed toward monolingual and English-speaking populations. This commentary considers Kidd and Garcia’s arguments in light of our research on mother-preschooler discourse and non-verbal communication in Thai monolingual and Thai-English bilingual children. We discuss lessons learned from testing linguistically diverse children and underscore
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Learning from Mayan Tzotzil: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Lourdes de León
In response to Kidd and Garcia’s survey that shows the paucity of authors and languages from the Global South in four leading journals of language acquisition, I argue that Mayan language acquisition has contributed in important ways to test theories in the field at large. I specifically outline major contributions from Mayan Tzotzil acquisition to topics of input, lexical, semantic and morphological
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Considerations when using rating scales to support teacher professional development: A commentary on Weadman, Serry and Snow (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-24 Sandra J. Mathers
While observational rating scales such as the Emergent Literacy and Language Early Childhood Checklist for Teachers (ELLECCT) have potential to support Early Childhood Teachers in improving their practice, the existence of a valid and reliable tool is no guarantee of success. A carefully constructed model of teacher professional development will be required to ensure benefits for instructional practice
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Individual differences in the effectiveness of a narrative-promoting intervention: Relation with executive function skills First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Edy Veneziano, Eleonora Bartoli
This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children’s narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual differences in the effectiveness of the SCI and investigated
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Community-set goals are needed to increase diversity in language acquisition research: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Naomi Havron, Camila Scaff, Kasia Hitczenko, Alejandrina Cristia
This commentary argues that to increase diversity in language acquisition research, the field should define specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-defined goals, and prioritize solutions based on their importance, tractability, and neglectedness, ideally in collaboration with a variety of other agents outside the research community.
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Talk the talk and walk the walk: Diversity and culture impact all of development – A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Lana B. Karasik, Yana A. Kuchirko
Research on early language abilities, much like psychology more broadly, has focused almost exclusively on infants from English and Indo-European languages, thereby limiting understanding of the role of varying linguistic experience that supports language abilities. We underscore Kidd and Garcia’s call to expand, diversify, and globalize language research. Using examples from motor development in which
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We need a comparative approach to language acquisition: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-13 Morten H. Christiansen, Pablo Contreras Kallens, Fabio Trecca
The study by Kidd and Garcia is long overdue. Their analyses of published research on language acquisition highlight the lack of typological diversity in studies of how children acquire their native tongue. We concur with their conclusion that more research on understudied languages is urgently needed. However, we argue that what the field needs is not just wider cross-linguistic coverage but a systematic
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Capturing what remains: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-13 Dan Slobin
Kidd and Garcia remind us of the urgency of gathering comparable child language data across languages and cultures. They provide useful guidelines, and more are suggested here. Languages used for comparative analysis should be picked with regard to precise typological contrasts, pinpointing structures that promise to reveal processes of acquisition. Our knowledge gap may not be as severe as it seems
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Acquisition of Eegimaa (Atlantic family, Niger-Congo) in a polyadic environment: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Serge Sagna, Virve Vihman, Dunstan Brown
Research on lesser studied languages is vital for the advancement of theories of language acquisition. We discuss two areas where data from Eegimaa have the potential to produce innovative research: (1) language typology, with an overview of the complex demonstratives found in this language, and (2) learning environment and input speech. Here, we show that Eegimaa children learn to speak in a polyadic
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Some concrete steps for journal editorial boards: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022) First Lang. (IF 1.828) Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Sudha Arunachalam, Kamil Ud Deen, Yi Ting Huang, Jeffrey Lidz, Karen Miller, Mitsuhiko Ota, Kriszta Szendroi
As members of the editorial team at Language Acquisition, we read Kidd and Garcia’s target article with enthusiasm. In our commentary, we outline some specific ideas for how journals can help to alleviate the issues raised by Kidd and Garcia, some of which are in progress or in place at Language Acquisition, and some of which we hope to undertake alongside other journals in the field. We focus on concrete