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Social factors in the acquisition of a new word orderEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Present syntax acquisition tasks are not optimal for studying how children learn a new syntactic constraint and generalize it in sentence production. To address this issue, this study modified Akhtar’s production task where novel word orders were learned, so that it was more socially natural. Three- and four-year-old children were tested in this new task and the role of input factors was assessed. The new task was more effective at eliciting the novel word order, but the role of input factors differed from earlier studies. To trace the source of these differences, the study manipulated the social features directly in...
Source: First Language - September 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Chang, F., Kobayashi, T., Amano, S. Tags: Articles Source Type: journals

'I like Barney': Preschoolers' spontaneous conversational initiations with peersEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study provides a first in-depth examination of preschoolers’ peer-to-peer conversational initiations. The snack-time conversations of a class of 25 preschool children were videotaped bi-weekly for 21 weeks; 507 conversational initiations were identified and classified according to a detailed coding scheme that included utterance type (e.g., comment, question), person or object referent, person referenced (e.g., self, listener), and, of particular interest, reference to mental states. Of all initiations, 77.5% referenced persons (41.2% listener) and almost 30% referenced mental states, suggesting preschoolers are...
Source: First Language - September 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: O'Neill, D. K., Main, R. M., Ziemski, R. A. Tags: Articles Source Type: journals

Information structural constraints on children's early language production: The acquisition of the focus particle auch ('also') in German-learning 12- to 36-month-oldsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article presents new findings for the acquisition of the focus particle auch (‘also’) in German-learning children. In a longitudinal study with 11 children between 1;00 and 3;00 years of age complemented by two experiments with children aged 2;4 and 2;8, the authors investigated children’s production of the accented and unaccented auch. The results confirm earlier findings of a temporal delay between the first occurrences of both auch-variants. Based on the empirical findings, an account for this asymmetry is proposed that relates it to a more general developmental tendency that is characterized by a...
Source: First Language - September 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Muller, A., Hohle, B., Schmitz, M., Weissenborn, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: journals

Telephone-mediated communication effects on young children's oral and written narrativesEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study tested the effectiveness of a telephone-mediated language intervention on enhancing young children’s recontextualization processes in narrative expression. A four-week training program was incorporated into a primary school language-arts curriculum to investigate whether telephone experience designed to heighten listener awareness would augment oral and written narrative skill development. Findings supported predictions that telephone experience would affect both oral and written narrative expression. The telephone intervention enhanced oral psycholinguistic and narrative productivity over the face-to-face...
Source: First Language - September 28, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Cameron, C. A., Hutchison, J. Tags: Articles Source Type: journals

Book Review: The bilingual child: Early development and language contact By Virginia Yip & Stephen Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Pp. xxii + 295. ISBN 978-0-52183-617-3 (Hbk), 978-0-52154-476-4 (Pbk)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - July 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kupisch, T. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

`I want hold Postman Pat': An investigation into the acquisition of infinitival marker `to'Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article aims to explain these omissions by investigating the emergence of infinitival-to, and its production/omission in obligatory contexts. A series of corpus analyses were conducted on the naturalistic data from one to 13 children between the ages of approximately 2;0 and 3;1 testing three hypotheses from two theoretical viewpoints. The data suggest that the errors are associated with different verb sequences (e.g., going-to and going-X) and their frequencies in the language to which children are exposed. The article concludes that these constructions compete for output when children are producing those verbs and t...
Source: First Language - July 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kirjavainen, M., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., Tomasello, M. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

An investigation into Malay numeral classifier acquisition through an elicited production taskEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The act of categorization and labeling is fundamental in human cognition and language development. By studying numeral classifier acquisition, researchers are able to examine how children learn to categorize and label objects in their environment using a constrained framework. The current study investigated the acquisition of eight shape-based numeral classifiers in Malay through an elicited production task in 140 6- to 9-year-old children. The aim was to examine the developmental patterns observed in the production of Malay shape-based numeral classifiers. Results indicated that the ability to produce the correct numeral ...
Source: First Language - July 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Salehuddin, K., Winskel, H. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Parental input and connective acquisition: A growth curve analysisEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, the influence of parental input on the acquisition of discourse connectives was investigated. Three factors were hypothesized to play a role in contributing to the course of language acquisition: first, an increase in age, and hence, an increase in conceptual abilities; second, short-term frequency effects (effects of parental input in the space of one recording); and third, long-term frequency effects (effects of the cumulative parental input over a longer period of time). The authors developed a growth curve analysis and used this to analyze data from a dense longitudinal corpus of a German boy aged 1;11.1...
Source: First Language - July 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: van Veen, R., Evers-Vermeul, J., Sanders, T., van den Bergh, H. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Five-year-olds' book talk and story retelling: Contributions of mother--child joint bookreadingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examined the participation of preschool children (mean age 5;1) in two literacy-related activities — talking about a book with their mothers and subsequent independent retelling of the story. Sixty-two mother—child dyads from low-income families participated. Analysis of bookreading and story retelling transcripts revealed wide variability in extratextual talk during bookreading by both children and mothers. Children's responsive, but not spontaneous, extratextual book talk was closely associated with maternal types of talk. Children's story retelling skills were not related to the types of talk they...
Source: First Language - July 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kang, J. Y., Kim, Y.-S., Pan, B. A. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Do 2-year-olds disambiguate and extend words learned from video?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigated whether children learned, disambiguated, and extended words presented via video. Eighteen 2-year-olds saw a series of short videos. Each video depicted a novel target object that was labeled with a novel word. Then the target object was replaced on screen with a pair of objects (which varied by condition) and children were asked to select the object that best matched a novel word. In the baseline and disambiguation conditions, children saw the target and a novel distracter. In the extension condition, children saw an exemplar of the target and a novel distracter. Results showed that children selecte...
Source: First Language - April 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Scofield, J., Williams, A. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Some cues are stronger than others: The (non)interpretation of 3rd person present --s as a tense marker by 6- and 7-year-oldsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article describes two experiments examining how 6- and 7-year-old Standard American English-speaking children interpret 3rd person present —s as a tense marker, as compared to lexical items and past tense —ed. Because —s corresponds to multiple meanings, unlike —ed, it may result in later acquisition. Using an offline picture-choice task (Experiment 1), the study found that while all children successfully comprehended —ed, only the 7-year-olds successfully comprehended —s. Eye-tracking measures (Experiment 2) revealed that the 6-year-olds are actually sensitive to —s, but that...
Source: First Language - April 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Beyer, T., Hudson Kam, C. L. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Preschoolers' use of analogies in referential communicationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In referential communication tasks, preschoolers' messages often fail. Children appear to produce `nonconventional' messages involving `idiosyncratic' or `private' meanings. The aim of this study was to examine whether some nonconventional messages are analogies that function to permit children to communicate in the absence of possessing a conventional name for an intended referent. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds were presented a classical referential communication task consisting of `easy-' and `difficult-to-name' sets of items. As predicted, children at both ages produced conventional messages to refer to `easy' sti...
Source: First Language - April 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Iozzi, L., Barbieri, M. S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

The development of other-related conversational skills: A case study of conversational repair during the early yearsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The analysis of conversational repair provides one route into understanding how young children learn the skills required for participating in talk. One key aspect of repair is the ability to respond appropriately to other participants. Employing a longitudinal case study approach, this article examines in detail the conversational repair skills of one child during the period where she is acquiring core conversational abilities and competencies (from 1;0 to 3;10). Focusing on the development of other-related conversational repair skills, 163 instances of other-related repair were examined and analysed. Extracts highlight th...
Source: First Language - April 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Forrester, M. A., Cherington, S. M. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Elicited production of case-marking in Russian and Serbian children: Are diminutive nouns easier to inflect?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Two experiments used an elicited speech-production paradigm to explore children's acquisition of noun case-marking inflections. Russian (N = 24, 2;10— 4;6 years) and Serbian children (N = 24, 2;10—4;11) were asked to produce prepositional phrases requiring genitive or dative inflections of masculine and feminine, familiar and novel, simplex (vaza [Ru/Se: vase]) and diminutive (Ru: vazochka, Se: vazica) nouns. Across languages, children produced fewer case-marking errors with familiar compared to novel nouns, and diminutive compared to simplex nouns. The diminutive advantage occurred despite a markedly lower fre...
Source: First Language - April 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kempe, V., Seva, N., Brooks, P. J., Mironova, N., Pershukova, A., Fedorova, O. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

On the relationship between morphological and phonological awareness: Effects of training in kindergarten and in first-grade readingEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examined the relationship between phonological and morphological awareness in kindergarten, and their respective influence on learning to read in first grade, through an experimental training design with three groups of children. One experimental group received phonological awareness training while the other received morphological awareness training. The control group did not receive any training. Both training sessions were efficient since the largest pre- and post-test improvements were observed in the trained domains. Reciprocal influence analysis indicated that morphological awareness improved phonological s...
Source: First Language - January 29, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Casalis, S., Cole, P. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Promoting morphological awareness in Hebrew-speaking grade-schoolers: An intervention study using linguistic humorEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Research indicates that morphological awareness contributes to success in literacy acquisition and consolidation, since morphology links together phonological and semantic facets of language. The role of morphology is especially important in Hebrew, a highly synthetic Semitic language. The current study aimed to investigate the impact of an intervention program on knowledge and awareness of morphology in Hebrew-speaking grade-schoolers. Two three-month intervention programs were conducted in two groups of 4th-grade children: a metalinguistic morphological intervention program using linguistic humor, and a parallel interven...
Source: First Language - January 29, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Ravid, D., Geiger, V. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

The relation between ambiguity understanding and metalinguistic discussion of joking riddles in good and poor comprehenders: Potential for intervention and possible processes of changeEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigated understanding of language ambiguity as a source of individual differences in children's reading comprehension skill, and the role of peer metalinguistic discussion in fostering comprehension improvement. Twenty-four 7- to 9-year-old children worked in pairs to discuss and resolve ambiguities in joking riddles. Their reading comprehension increased significantly more than a group of 24 no-treatment controls. Analysis of the children's discussions shows that comprehension improvement was associated with increases over training sessions in frequency of metalinguistic comments about the text ambiguities...
Source: First Language - January 29, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Yuill, N. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Incidental receptive language growth associated with expressive grammar intervention in SLIEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Children with SLI (Specific Language Impairment) display language deficits in the absence of frank neurological lesions, global cognitive deficits or significant clinical hearing loss. Although these children can display disruptions in both receptive and expressive grammar, the intervention literature has been largely focused on expressive deficits. Thus, there are numerous reports in the literature suggesting that expressive language skills can be improved using focused presentation of grammatical targets (cf. conversational recast; Camarata, Nelson & Camarata, 1994), but there have been few investigations addressing ...
Source: First Language - January 29, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Camarata, S., Nelson, K. E., Gillum, H., Camarata, M. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Treatment of syntactic movement in syntactic SLI: A case studyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We describe a study of syntactic intervention administered to a 12;2-year-old individual with syntactic SLI, who had difficulties in the comprehension and production of structures containing syntactic movement such as relative clauses, object questions, topicalization sentences, and sentences with verb movement. The intervention, comprised of 16 sessions, was based on syntactic theory and included explicit teaching of syntactic movement, relying on a type of syntactic knowledge that was intact — the argument structure of the verb. The participant's performance was assessed before and after treatment, and for some of ...
Source: First Language - January 29, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Levy, H., Friedmann, N. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

From implicit to explicit language knowledge in intervention: Introduction to the Special Issue on intervention and metalanguageEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The Special Issue is themed on intervention programs which set educational and clinical goals and use explicit language instruction to achieve them. This introduction to the Special Issue explores the non-obvious relationship between intervention, metalinguistics and the study of developmental psycholinguistics. Intervention is typically designed to remedy and accelerate processes that are assumed to be naturally occurring under optimal circumstances. Beyond employing intervention to test hypotheses in developmental cognitive science, most intervention studies are explicitly constructed to improve impaired or non-optimal l...
Source: First Language - January 29, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Ravid, D., Hora, A. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

AcknowledgementsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - October 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Book Review: Child Language: The Parametric Approach: By W. Snyder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Pp 209. ISBN 978-0-19-929670-5 (Pbk)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - October 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Healey, E. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Young children's yes bias: How does it relate to verbal ability, inhibitory control, and theory of mind?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The aim of the present study was to investigate how young children reduce a yes bias, the tendency to answer `yes' to yes-no questions. Specifically, we examined three possible factors: verbal ability, inhibitory control and theory of mind. Results revealed that verbal ability and inhibitory control were strongly associated with a yes bias even after controlling for age. Regression analyses revealed that these two factors significantly predicted a yes bias. Theory of mind was not significantly correlated with a yes bias. The results indicate that young children may have to inhibit a dominant `yes' response when they are su...
Source: First Language - October 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Moriguchi, Y., Okanda, M., Itakura, S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Antonyms in children's and child-directed speechEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article presents two studies based on a corpus of American English speech by and to five children from 2 to 5 years old. The first study investigates frequency of antonym co-occurrence in speakers' turns. The second examines the discourse-functional properties of those co-occurrences, with comparison to adult-directed adult English. We find: (1) children know/use antonyms at earlier ages than experimental studies have shown; (2) children use antonyms for mostly the same discursive purposes as adults do; (3) children can be categorized as being either `heavy' or `light' antonym users, and `heaviness' of antonym use see...
Source: First Language - October 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Murphy, M. L., Jones, S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Conversational correlates of children's acquisition of mental verbs and a theory of mindEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The purpose of this study was to conduct a detailed examination of the ways mothers use mental verbs in conversations with three- and four-year-old children, and to link these usages to the children's developing understanding of mental verbs and a theory of mind. Sixty three- and four-year-olds, either attending preschool (PS) or not (NPS) were given tasks assessing mental verb distinctions and false belief. Their mothers' mental verb use was coded for (a) frequency, (b) type of utterance, (c) type of subordinate clause, (d) the person of the subject of the verb, and (e) the certainty of think. Within the three-year-olds, ...
Source: First Language - October 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Howard, A. A., Mayeux, L., Naigles, L. R. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Deaf and hearing students' referential strategies in writing: What referential cohesion tells us about deaf students' literacy developmentEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, the pragmatic use of pronominal and nominal forms of reference in written stories was considered instead as a mark of literacy development in deaf and hearing students. Participants in the study were 17 deaf high-school students, 17 school-age matched hearing controls, and 16 hearing second-graders (novice writers) who were asked to write a picture-story, Frog, Where are you?, for a hearing reader who was unacquainted with it. Results revealed that deaf students appear to use the same variety of referential devices as hearing students when writing and, in most cases, these devices are used appropriately. How...
Source: First Language - October 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Arfe, B., Perondi, I. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Book Review: Language and the Learning Curve: A New Theory of Syntactic Development: By A. Ninio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Pp. 206. ISBN 978-0-19-929982-9 (Pbk)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - July 24, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Wagner, L. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Metapragmatic comments indexing conversational practices of preschool children in institutional discourseEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The aim of the present study was to reveal the criteria of conversational appropriateness displayed to children (age range: 3;01—4;09 and 5;0—6;05) through adults' metapragmatic comments in preschool and kindergarten settings. The study focused on two categories of comments: violation of a discourse maxim and discourse management. The results indicate a distinct pattern of use of metapragmatic comments by the adults. Teachers tend to conduct the discourse mainly by allocating turns to the children and to indicate the violation of the degree of informativeness (maxim of quantity), signaling to the children the s...
Source: First Language - July 24, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Yifat, R., Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

The use of uh and um by 3- and 4-year-old native English-speaking children: Not quite right but not completely wrongEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The delay markers (DMs) uh and um are often used by adult English speakers to indicate that an upcoming pause is due to a speech disruption, not the end of a conversational turn. Moreover, uh and um indicate different degrees of disruption (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002). Thus, it appears that children must learn how to use DMs appropriately. In the current study we examined DM use in elicited speech samples from 24 3- and 4-year-old children. We found that pauses following DMs were longer than those not following a DM, but that there was no difference between the pauses following uh and um. Children at this age, then, appear...
Source: First Language - July 24, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Hudson Kam, C. L., Edwards, N. A. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Coordinated attention, declarative and imperative pointing in infants with and without Down syndrome: Sharing experiences with adults and peersEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Discussion centers on the implications of these findings for theories of early communication development and mental state awareness. (Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - July 24, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Legerstee, M., Fisher, T. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Early lexical development of Finnish children: A longitudinal studyEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The growth rate and the development of the composition of the receptive and expressive lexicon were studied in a longitudinal sample of 35 Finnish children. The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory was used to gather data of the receptive lexicon at 0;9, 1;0 and 1;3, and the expressive lexicon at 0;9, 1;0, 1;3, 1;6 and 2;0. The receptive lexicon was acquired earlier, at a faster rate and with higher individual variation than the expressive lexicon. A gender difference was found in expressive vocabulary, but not in receptive vocabulary. The growth trajectories...
Source: First Language - July 24, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Stolt, S., Haataja, L., Lapinleimu, H., Lehtonen, L. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Call for PapersEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - July 24, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Gestures accompanying speech in specifically language-impaired children and their timing with speechEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The repertoire and timing of gestures accompanying speech were compared in children with specific language impairment (SLI), aged 5—10 years, in typically developing peers (CA), individually matched on age and nonverbal IQ, and in younger language-matched (LM) children. They were videotaped in two tasks, recounting a cartoon and describing their classroom. Three types of gestures were coded — iconics, deictics and beats — and the synchrony of these gestures with speech was examined in terms of number of words encompassed, grammatical speech category at gesture onset, and relationship of iconic gestures to...
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blake, J., Myszczyszyn, D., Jokel, A., Bebiroglu, N. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Learning to talk and gesture about motion in FrenchEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study explores how French adults and children aged four and six years talk and gesture about voluntary motion, examining (1) how they encode path and manner in speech, (2) how they encode this information in accompanying gestures; and (3) whether gestures are co-expressive with speech or express other information. When path and manner are equally relevant, children's and adults' speech and gestures both focus on path, rather than on manner. Moreover, gestures are predominantly co-expressive with speech at all ages. However, when they are non-redundant, adults tend to gesture about path while talking about manner, wher...
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Gullberg, M., Hendriks, H., Hickmann, M. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Learning words by hand: Gesture's role in predicting vocabulary developmentEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Children vary widely in how quickly their vocabularies grow. Can looking at early gesture use in children and parents help us predict this variability? We videotaped 53 English-speaking parent-child dyads in their homes during their daily activities for 90-minutes every four months between child age 14 and 34 months. At 42 months, children were given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). We found that child gesture use at 14 months was a significant predictor of vocabulary size at 42 months, above and beyond the effects of parent and child word use at 14 months. Parent gesture use at 14 months was not directly relate...
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Rowe, M. L., Ozcaliskan, S., Goldin-Meadow, S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Learning to talk in a gesture-rich world: Early communication in Italian vs. American childrenEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We examined gesture and speech production in Italian and US children between the onset of first words and the onset of two-word combinations. We found differences in the size of the gesture repertoires produced by the Italian vs. the American children, differences that were inversely related to the size of the children's spoken vocabularies. Despite these differences in gesture vocabulary, in both cultures we found that gesture + speech combinations reliably predicted the onset of two-word combinations, underscoring the robustness of gesture as a harbinger of linguistic development. (Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Iverson, J. M., Capirci, O., Volterra, V., Goldin-Meadow, S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

The relationship between early gestures and intonationEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Pragmatic language skills (e.g., communicative intention) have traditionally been difficult to measure consistently in young children. This challenge makes it difficult to establish links between early productive speech/ language behaviors (e.g., intonation) and communicative intentions, which may prove to be useful for early diagnosis of speech and language impairment. The current study proposes a methodology for observing and measuring language produced by children in the single-word developmental stage that does not rely on usual linguistic cues (e.g., lexical meaning). The goals of this study were: (1) to determine whe...
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Balog, H. L., Brentari, D. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Gestures of apes and pre-linguistic human children: Similar or different?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article provides an overview on the gestural signalling of monkeys and apes to enable a comparison with gestures in pre- or just-linguistic children. Implications for the evolution of language are discussed. (Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Pika, S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Introduction to Special Issue: Gestures and communicative developmentEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
What does hand movement have to do with language and communicative development? This Introduction proposes that language acquisition researchers have at least four reasons to be interested in gesture and communicative development. First, children begin to gesture before talking. Second, children continue to gesture even after they start to talk, and through to adulthood. Third, recent theoretical perspectives on language acquisition have advanced a functional approach to communicative development in which usage is crucial in language acquisition. Fourth, the argument that spoken language evolved from gestures raises intrig...
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Guidetti, M., Nicoladis, E. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Call for papers for a Special issue of First Language: Linguistic interfaces in child language acquisitionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - April 10, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Maternal uses of non-object terms in child-directed speech: Color, number and timeEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Non-object terms including color, number and time words pose a challenge for word learning due in part to non-obvious word-referent mappings. Finding early word-word knowledge for such terms, Shatz has suggested that exposure to them in varied conversational contexts might facilitate word-word mappings. To address whether input feasibly carries such information, we examined longitudinal transcripts from the CHILDES database for the frequency and uses of subsets of color and number words in mothers' speech to toddlers and of time words to preschoolers. All the mothers studied made varied uses of the terms from these lexical...
Source: First Language - February 1, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tare, M., Shatz, M., Gilbertson, L. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Girls talk about dolls and boys about cars? Analyses of group and individual variation in Danish children's first wordsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Based on data from the Danish Longitudinal CDI study on 182 Danish children, we analyse aspects of variation in the children's first 100 words (produced). First, we demonstrate the effect of gender and birth order (number of siblings) on acquisition times of first words by identifying single words which are significantly earlier in the productive repertoire of, for instance, girls versus boys. We also investigate the effect of the same factors on the composition of the vocabulary where the definition of categories (word classes) is based on the CDI's thematic categorization. Finally, we investigate the individuality of the...
Source: First Language - February 1, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Wehberg, S., Vach, W., Bleses, D., Thomsen, P., Madsen, T. O., Basboll, H. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Toddlers' persistence when communication fails: Response motivation and goal substitutionEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Communicative breakdowns were created in response to toddlers' single-word requests by means of two feedback conditions: one involving goal substitution, the other stating explicitly that the speaker was not understood (i.e., `I don't know what you mean'). Participants were 15 children, ages 17—25 months. Children typically abandoned their original requests in response to goal substitution but revised or repeated their requests when confronted with `I don't know what you mean.' Thus, in the early stages of language development, toddlers' response persistence appeared to depend in large part upon motivation for goal a...
Source: First Language - February 1, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Fagan, M. K. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Developmental differences in the effects of negative and positive evidenceEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The current study sought to assess development differences in children's learning of irregular nouns and verbs under conditions of negative and positive evidence. Fifty-five 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children learned nonsense nouns and verbs and were later asked to produce plural forms for the nouns and past tense forms for the verbs. Forms were constructed to be irregular, and half were provided through negative evidence and half through positive evidence. Age, form (noun vs. verb) and evidence type (negative vs. positive) interacted: 3-year-olds learned more nouns through negative evidence t(15) = 2.76, p = 0.014, r2 = 0.34,...
Source: First Language - February 1, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Strapp, C. M., Bleakney, D. M., Helmick, A. L., Tonkovich, H. M. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Dinner conversations with a trilingual two-year-old: Language socialization in a multilingual contextEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, early pragmatic development in a trilingual child is addressed from the perspective of the language dynamics of a multilingual family. How young children learn to adjust their speech to their interlocutors can be seen clearly in the language choices and the mixing patterns of the trilingual two-year-old. The child selected language(s) not only from the language(s) spoken to her but also with attention to her interlocutor's linguistic proficiencies and the language context in which she found herself along a monolingual to trilingual continuum. She shifted languages in family dinner conversations according to ...
Source: First Language - February 1, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Quay, S. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Contents of Volume 27Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - October 30, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Tags: Article Source Type: journals

AcknowledgementsEmail this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - October 30, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Book Review: Advances in the Sign Language Development of Deaf Children: Edited by B. Schick, M. Marschark & P. E. Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Pp. 396. ISBN 0-19-518094-1 (Hbk)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - October 30, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kyle, F. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Book Review: Blackwell Handbook of Language Development: Edited by E. Hoff & M. Shatz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Pp. 502. ISBN-101405132531 (HBk)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - October 30, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Rowland, C. Tags: Article Source Type: journals

Book Review: The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages: Edited by V. Torrens & L. Escobar (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006). Pp. 422. ISBN 90-272-5301-3 (Hbk)Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
(Source: First Language)
Source: First Language - October 30, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Guijarro-Fuentes, P. Tags: Article Source Type: journals