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Verbal inflection in the acquisition of Kuwaiti Arabic.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the distribution of imperfective and perfective verb inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic. Spontaneous speech of three children (1 ; 8-3 ; 1) was analyzed for accuracy and error types. The results showed that the verbal inflections appeared correct almost all the time (89-97% of the time). Agreement errors appeared 3-11% of the time. The children did not inflect the verb in obligatory contexts in describing ongoing action 2-12% of the time. It is predicted that children acquiring Arabic would select a default form in place of fully inflected forms. The children used a non-finite form which is i...
Source: Journal of Child Language - November 16, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Aljenaie K Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Focus identification in child Mandarin.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, we investigated how Mandarin-speaking children and adults interpret focus structures like Zhiyou Yuehan chi-le pingguo 'Only John ate an apple' and Shi Yuehan chi-de pingguo 'It is John who ate an apple'. We found that children tended to associate focus operators zhiyou 'only' and shi 'be' with the verb phrase (VP), whereas adults uniquely associated them with the subject noun phrase (NP). To account for this difference, we propose that children initially treat focus operators as adverbials, thus ending up associating them with the VP. In order to assess our proposal, we examined children's understanding of ...
Source: Journal of Child Language - November 16, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Zhou P, Crain S Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Parents' use of conventional and unconventional labels in conversations with their preschoolers.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTParents' use of conventional versus unconventional labels with their two- (n=12), three- (n=12) and four-year-old children (n=12) was assessed as they talked about objects that were either known or unknown to them. For known objects, parents provided typical conventional labels casually during the conversation. For unknown objects, parents were less likely to use typical nouns as labels and marked their labels with additional information suggesting that the labels might be unconventional. Parents marked potentially unconventional labels by providing explicit statements of ignorance and paralinguistic cues of un...
Source: Journal of Child Language - November 5, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Henderson AM, Sabbagh MA Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Preschoolers' extension of novel words to animals and artifacts.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We examined whether preschoolers' ontological knowledge would influence lexical extension. In Experiment 1, four-year-olds were presented with a novel label for either an object with eyes described as an animal, or the same object without eyes described as a tool. In the animal condition, children extended the label to similar-shaped objects, whereas in the tool condition, children extended the label to similar-function objects. In Experiment 2, when four-year-olds were presented with objects with eyes described as tools, they extended the label on the basis of shared function. These experiments suggest that preschoolers' ...
Source: Journal of Child Language - October 30, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Graham SA, Welder AN, Merrifield BA, Berman JM Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Determining that a label is kind-referring: factors that influence children's and adults' novel word extensions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe present studies examined factors that influence children's and adults' interpretation of a novel word. Four factors are hypothesized to emphasize that a label refers to a richly structured category (also known as a 'kind'): generic language, internal property attributions, familiar kind labels and absence of a target photograph. In Study 1, for college students (N=125), internal property attributions resulted in more taxonomic and fewer shape responses. In Study 2, for four-year-olds (N=126), the presence of generic language and familiar kind labels resulted in more taxonomic choices. Further, the presence ...
Source: Journal of Child Language - October 30, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tare M, Gelman SA Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Predictors of early precocious talking: A prospective population study.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examines potential predictors of 'precocious talking' (expressive language 90th percentile) at one and two years of age, and of 'stability' in precocious talking across both time periods, drawing on data from a prospective community cohort comprising over 1,800 children. Logistic regression was used to examine the relationship between precocious talking and the following potential predictors: gender, birth order, birth weight, non-English speaking background, socioeconomic status, maternal age, maternal mental health scores, and vocabulary and educational attainment of parents. The strongest predictors of precoc...
Source: Journal of Child Language - October 30, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Skeat J, Wake M, Reilly S, Eadie P, Bretherton L, Bavin EL, Ukoumunne OC Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

How vocabulary size in two languages relates to efficiency in spoken word recognition by young Spanish-English bilinguals.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTResearch using online comprehension measures with monolingual children shows that speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are correlated with lexical development. Here we examined speech processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary development in bilingual children learning both Spanish and English (n=26 ; 2 ; 6). Between-language associations were weak: vocabulary size in Spanish was uncorrelated with vocabulary in English, and children's facility in online comprehension in Spanish was unrelated to their facility in English. Instead, efficiency of online processing in one language was significantly re...
Source: Journal of Child Language - September 2, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Marchman VA, Fernald A, Hurtado N Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Sensitivity to conversational maxims in deaf and hearing children.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTWe investigated whether access to a sign language affects the development of pragmatic competence in three groups of deaf children aged 6 to 11 years: native signers from deaf families receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction, native signers from deaf families receiving oralist instruction and late signers from hearing families receiving oralist instruction. The performance of these children was compared to a group of hearing children aged 6 to 7 years on a test designed to assess sensitivity to violations of conversational maxims. Native signers with bimodal/bilingual instruction were as able as the hearing chi...
Source: Journal of Child Language - August 31, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Surian L, Tedoldi M, Siegal M Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Tense and aspect in sentence interpretation by children with specific language impairment.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are sensitive to completion cues in their comprehension of tense. In two experiments, children with SLI (ages 4 ; 1 to 6 ; 4) and typically developing (TD) children (ages 3 ; 5 to 6 ; 5) participated in a sentence-to-scene matching task adapted from Wagner (2001). Sentences were in either present or past progressive and used telic predicates. Actions were performed twice in succession; the action was either completed or not completed in the first instance. In both experiments, the children with SLI were less accurate...
Source: Journal of Child Language - August 23, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Leonard LB, Deevy P Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

What's in the input? Frequent frames in child-directed speech offer distributional cues to grammatical categories in Spanish and English.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTRecent analyses have revealed that child-directed speech contains distributional regularities that could, in principle, support young children's discovery of distinct grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective). In particular, a distributional unit known as the frequent frame appears to be especially informative (Mintz, 2003). However, analyses have focused almost exclusively on the distributional information available in English. Because languages differ considerably in how the grammatical forms are marked within utterances, the scarcity of cross-linguistic evidence represents an unfortunate gap. We therefo...
Source: Journal of Child Language - August 23, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Weisleder A, Waxman SR Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Long-term effects of preterm birth on language and literacy at eight years.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In conclusion, our study established that a partially atypical trajectory emerged in preterms, showing specific long-term effects of preterm birth on language and literacy development. PMID: 19698208 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Journal of Child Language)
Source: Journal of Child Language - August 23, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Guarini A, Sansavini A, Fabbri C, Savini S, Alessandroni R, Faldella G, Karmiloff-Smith A Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Universal production patterns and ambient language influences in babbling: A cross-linguistic study of Korean- and English-learning infants*Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe phonetic characteristics of canonical babbling produced by Korean- and English-learning infants were compared with consonant and vowel frequencies observed in infant-directed speech produced by Korean- and English-speaking mothers. For infant output, babbling samples from six Korean-learning infants were compared with an existing English babbling database (Davis & MacNeilage, 1995). For ambient language comparisons, consonants and vowels in ten Korean and ten English infant-directed speech (IDS) samples were analyzed. The two infant groups demonstrated similar consonant patterns, but showed different vo...
Source: Journal of Child Language - July 1, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Lee SA, Davis B, Macneilage P Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

CLEX: A cross-linguistic lexical norms database*Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This report describes the development of CLEX, a new web-based cross-linguistic database for lexical data from adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. CLEX provides tools for a range of analyses within and across languages. It is designed to incorporate additional language datasets easily, and to permit users to define mappings between lexical items in pairs of languages for more specific cross-linguistic comparisons. PMID: 19570318 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Journal of Child Language)
Source: Journal of Child Language - July 1, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Jørgensen RN, Dale PS, Bleses D, Fenson L Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Segmental distribution patterns of English infant- and adult-directed speech.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study compared segmental distribution patterns for consonants and vowels in English infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS). A previous study of Korean indicated that segmental patterns of IDS differed from ADS patterns (Lee, Davis & MacNeilage, 2008). The aim of the current study was to determine whether such differences in Korean are universal or language-specific. Results indicate that consonant distribution patterns of English IDS were significantly different from English ADS. Speakers who used IDS produced fewer fricatives, affricates, nasals and liquids, but more stops and glides, than s...
Source: Journal of Child Language - July 1, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Lee SA, Davis BL Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Validating justifications in preschool girls' and boys' friendship group talk: implications for linguistic and socio-cognitive development.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTChildren are believed to construct their causal theories through talk and interaction, but with the exception of a few studies, little or nothing is known about how young children justify and build theories of the world together with same-age peers through naturally occurring interaction, Children's sensitivity to when a pair or group of interlocutors who interact frequently together feel that a justification is needed, is an index of developing pragmatic competence (Goetz & Shatz, 1999) and may be influenced by interactive goals and gender identity positioning. Studies suggest that salient contexts for jus...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kyratzis A, Ross TS, Koymen SB Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Semantic bias in the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study analyzes the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of children's relative clauses in spontaneous speech. Longitudinal data from five Japanese children are analyzed and compared with English data (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000). The results show that the relative clauses produced by Japanese children predominantly have stative/attributive predicates. Additionally, early relative clauses in Japanese are often used to identify a referent that is not present in the context of interaction. These findings contrast with Diessel & Tomasello's (2000) Engl...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Ozeki H, Shirai Y Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Children's sentence planning: Syntactic correlates of fluency variations.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We describe and interpret several regularities in these patterns for two groups of children ('young': three-five-year-olds; and 'older': six-eight-year-olds) and an adult comparison group. The evidence indicates a strong correspondence of adult and child responses to structural complexity, both in terms of global fluency measures and in terms of more detailed indicators of planning load. In addition, we report some specific contrasts in the patterning for children and adults that suggest disparities in processing resources and/or in local planning strategies. PMID: 19523262 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: ...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: McDaniel D, McKee C, Garrett MF Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Explaining the disambiguation effect: Don't exclude mutual exclusivity.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTWhen they see a familiar object and an unfamiliar one, and are asked to select the referent of a novel label, children usually choose the unfamiliar object. We asked whether this 'disambiguation effect' reflects an expectation that each object has just one label (mutual exclusivity), or an expectation about the intent of the speaker who uses a novel label. In Study 1, when a speaker gazed at or pointed toward the familiar object in a novel-familiar pair, children aged 2 ; 6 (N=64) selected that object in response to a neutral request, but were much less likely to do so in response to a label request. In Study 2...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Jaswal VK Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Development of children's ability to distinguish sarcasm and verbal irony*Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTAdults distinguish between ironic remarks directed at targets (sarcasm) and ironic remarks not directed at specific targets. We investigated the development of children's appreciation for this distinction by presenting these speech acts to 71 five- to six-year-olds and 71 nine- to ten-year-olds. Five- to six-year-olds were beginning to understand the non-literal meanings of sarcastic speakers and ironic speakers but did not distinguish ironic and sarcastic speakers' intentions. Nine- to ten-year-olds were more accurate at understanding sarcastic and ironic speakers and they distinguished these speakers' intenti...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 14, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Glenwright M, Pexman PM Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Now you hear it, now you don't: Vowel devoicing in Japanese infant-directed speech.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTIn this work, we examine a context in which a conflict arises between two roles that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays: making language structure salient and modeling the adult form of a language. Vowel devoicing in fluent adult Japanese creates violations of the canonical Japanese consonant-vowel word structure pattern by systematically devoicing particular vowels, yielding surface consonant clusters. We measured vowel devoicing rates in a corpus of infant- and adult-directed Japanese speech, for both read and spontaneous speech, and found that the mothers in our study preserve the fluent adult form of the la...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 2, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Fais L, Kajikawa S, Amano S, Werker JF Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Segmental production in Mandarin-learning infants.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe early development of vocalic and consonantal production in Mandarin-learning infants was studied at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations were recorded for 24 infants grouped by age: G1 (0 ; 7 to 1 ; 0) and G2 (1 ; 1 to 1 ; 6). Additionally, the infant-directed speech of 24 caregivers was recorded during natural infant-adult interactions to infer language-specific effects. Data were phonetically transcribed according to broad categories of vowels and consonants. Vocalic development, in comparison with reports for children of other linguistic environments, exhibited...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 2, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Chen LM, Kent RD Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Children's preference for HAS and LOCATED relations: A word learning bias for noun-noun compounds.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe present study investigates children's bias when interpreting novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. kig donka) that refer to combinations of novel objects (kig and donka). More specifically, it investigates children's understanding of modifier-head relations of the compounds and their preference for HAS or LOCATED relations (e.g. a donka that HAS a kig or a donka that is LOCATED near a kig) rather than a FOR relation (e.g. a donka that is used FOR kigs). In a forced-choice paradigm, two- and three-year-olds preferred interpretations with HAS/LOCATED relations, while five-year-olds and adults showed no preference f...
Source: Journal of Child Language - June 2, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Krott A, Gagné CL, Nicoladis E Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Early vocabulary development in Mandarin (Putonghua) and Cantonese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTParent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n=1694) and Cantonese (n=1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from approximately 1 ; 4 onward. Factors relevant to the difference were only-child status, monolingual households and caregiver education. In addition to the comparison of vocabulary scores overall, the development of noun classifiers, grammatical function words common to the two ...
Source: Journal of Child Language - May 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tardif T, Fletcher P, Liang W, Kaciroti N Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Rethinking child difficulty: The effect of NP type on children's processing of relative clauses in Hebrew.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTChildren find object relative clauses difficult. They show poor comprehension that lags behind production into their fifth year. This finding has shaped models of relative clause acquisition, with appeals to processing heuristics or syntactic preferences to explain why object relatives are more difficult than subject relatives. Two studies here suggest that children (age 4 ; 6) do not find all object relatives difficult: a corpus study shows that children most often hear and produce object relatives with pronominal subjects. But they are most often tested on ones with lexical-NP subjects (e.g. The nurse that th...
Source: Journal of Child Language - March 30, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Arnon I Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Child L2 development: A longitudinal case study on Voice Onset Times in word-initial stops.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThis paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study examining the acquisition of the English voice system by a three-year-old native speaker of Dutch. The study aims to examine whether the child develops two different phonetic systems or uses just one system for both languages, and compares the early L2 acquisition process with L1, simultaneous bilingual and late L2 acquisition. The results reveal that the child successfully acquires the English contrast between short-lag and long-lag stops, but gradually changes the Dutch system, which contrasts prevoiced with short-lag stops, into the direction of the...
Source: Journal of Child Language - March 27, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Simon E Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Phonological changes during the transition from one-word to productive word combination.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTWe investigated developmental changes during the transition from one-word to two-word production, focusing on strategies to lengthen utterances phonologically and to control utterances suprasegmentally. We hypothesized that there is a period of reorganization at the onset of word combinations indicated by decreases in both filler syllables (Fillers) and final syllable lengthening (FSL). The data are from a visually impaired child (Seth) between 1 ; 6.21 and 1 ; 10.26. Seth produced many Fillers until 1 ; 9 when their number decreased for about two weeks after which they changed in nature. FSL was observed until...
Source: Journal of Child Language - March 27, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Aoyama K, Peters AM, Winchester KS Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Preschool-aged children have difficulty constructing and interpreting simple utterances composed of graphic symbols.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study explored the ability of three- and four-year-old children without disabilities to perform tasks involving sequences of graphic symbols. Thirty participants were asked to transpose spoken simple sentences into graphic symbols by selecting individual symbols corresponding to the spoken words, and to interpret graphic symbol utterances by selecting one of four photographs corresponding to a sequence of three graphic symbols. The results showed that these were not simple tasks for the participants, and few of them performed in the expected manner - only one in transposition, and only one-third of participants in int...
Source: Journal of Child Language - March 27, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Sutton A, Trudeau N, Morford J, Rios M, Poirier MA Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Twelve-month-olds learn novel word-object pairings differing only in stress pattern.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, we examined whether or not infants can access subtle prosodic information such as lexical stress in a word learning task. We tested infants younger than 1 ; 2 to see if they could learn two new word-object associations that differ only in stress pattern (Sww versus wSw). Our results are the first to demonstrate that, even without contextual support, infants at 1 ; 0 succeed at this task, suggesting that the salient acoustic properties associated with lexical stress facilitate word-object associative learning. PMID: 19281635 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Journal of Child Language)
Source: Journal of Child Language - March 13, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Curtin S Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Optional elements and variant structures in the productions of bei2 'to give' dative constructions in Cantonese-speaking adults and three-year-old children.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We report on usage of dative constructions with the word bei2 'to give' in 86 parents and 53 three-year-old children during conversations. The parents used more P/SV than ditransitive bei2-datives, and vice versa for the children. Both groups showed a similar usage pattern of optional elements and variant structures in their ditransitive and P/SV bei2-datives. The roles of multiple construction types, optional elements and variant structures in children's learning of bei2-dative constructions are described. PMID: 19272209 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Journal of Child Language)
Source: Journal of Child Language - March 10, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Wong AM, Chow DC, McBride-Cheng C, Stokes SF Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Usage-based vs. rule-based learning: the acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThis paper discusses different approaches to language acquisition in relation to children's acquisition of word order in wh-questions in English and Norwegian. While generative models assert that children set major word order parameters and thus acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or generalized verb second (V2) at an early stage, some constructivist work argues that English-speaking children are simply reproducing frequent wh-word+auxiliary combinations in the input. The paper questions both approaches, re-evaluates some previous work, and provides some further data, concluding that the acquisition o...
Source: Journal of Child Language - March 9, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Westergaard M Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Age-related changes in acoustic modifications of Mandarin maternal speech to preverbal infants and five-year-old children: a longitudinal study.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTAcoustic-phonetic exaggeration of infant-directed speech (IDS) is well documented, but few studies address whether these features are modified with a child's age. Mandarin-speaking mothers were recorded while addressing an adult and their child at two ages (0 ; 7-1 ; 0 and 5 ; 0) to examine the acoustic-phonetic differences between IDS and child-directed speech (CDS). CDS exhibits an exaggeration pattern resembling that of IDS - expanded vowel space, longer vowels, higher pitch and greater lexical tone differences - when compared to ADS. Longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the extent of acoustic exaggeratio...
Source: Journal of Child Language - February 23, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Liu HM, Tsao FM, Kuhl PK Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Knowing more than one can say: The early regular plural.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThis paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A-->AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A-->AB). The children in A-->AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A-->AB supplied the singular form of A but children in A-->AA did not. Experiment 3 compared the performance of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children in A-->AA with common and novel nouns. The Japanese-speakin...
Source: Journal of Child Language - February 23, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Zapf JA, Smith LB Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Emerging temporality: past tense and temporal/aspectual markers in Spanish-speaking children's intra-conversational narratives.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, temporal/aspectual markers and narrative components were analyzed to explore interrelationships among grammatical and discourse skills. Children progressed from scattered unsystematic means of encoding temporality to mastering a basic linguistic system that included devices to mark loca...
Source: Journal of Child Language - February 19, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Uccelli P Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Grammaticality judgments in autism: Deviance or delay.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTLanguage in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the heterogeneity in language skills at younger ages, this assumption merits further investigation. Participants with autism (n=21, aged nine to seventeen years), matched on chronological age, receptive vocabulary and IQ, to 22 typically developing individuals, completed a...
Source: Journal of Child Language - February 19, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Eigsti IM, Bennetto L Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

How to measure development in corpora? An association strength approach.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTIn this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation of these proposals with data on the acquisition of the patterning of tense and grammatical aspect of four Russian children. The method, however, is suitable for a wide range of other acquisition questions as well. PMID...
Source: Journal of Child Language - February 16, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Stoll S, Gries ST Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Can input explain children's me-for-I errors?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTEnglish-speaking children make pronoun case errors producing utterances where accusative pronouns are used in nominative contexts (me do it). We investigate whether complex utterances in the input (Let me do it) might explain the origin of these errors. Longitudinal naturalistic data from seventeen English-speaking two- to four-year-olds was searched for 1psg accusative-for-nominative case errors and for all 1psg preverbal pronominal contexts. Their caregivers' data was also searched for 1psg preverbal pronominal contexts. The data show that the children's proportional use of me-for-I errors correlated with the...
Source: Journal of Child Language - February 16, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kirjavainen M, Theakston A, Lieven E Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Maternal mental state talk and infants' early gestural communication.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTTwenty-four infants were tested monthly for the production of imperative and declarative gestures between 0 ; 9 and 1 ; 3 and concurrent mother-infant free-play sessions were conducted at 0 ; 9, 1 ; 0 and 1 ; 3 (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, 1998). Free-play transcripts were subsequently coded for maternal talk about mental states. Results revealed that the earlier infants produced imperative gestures, the more frequently their mothers made reference to the infants' own volitional states (want, try, need, etc.) at 1 ; 3. The same relation also emerged using maternal reports of their infants' gestural commu...
Source: Journal of Child Language - February 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Slaughter V, Peterson CC, Carpenter M Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Acquisition of gender agreement in Lithuanian: Exploring the effect of diminutive usage in an elicited production task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited production task. Lithuanian is a richly inflected Baltic language, with two genders and seven cases. Younger (N=24, mean 3 ; 1, 2 ; 5-3 ; 8) and older (N=24, mean 6 ; 3, 5 ; 6-6 ; 9) children were shown pictures of animals and asked to describe them after hearing the animal's name. Animal names differed with respect to familiarity (novel vs. familiar), derivational status (diminutive vs. simplex) and gender (masculine vs. feminine). Analyses of gender-agreement errors based on adjective and pronoun usage indicated that younger child...
Source: Journal of Child Language - January 13, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Savickienė I, Kempe V, Brooks PJ Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

The contribution of language skills to reading fluency: A comparison of two orthographies for Hebrew.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe purpose of the present study was to explore the contribution of phonological and general language skills to reading fluency of pointed and unpointed Hebrew scripts. Reading, language and memory tasks were performed by 48 fifth-grade monolingual native Hebrew speakers. Results showed that the most marked predictor for both pointed and unpointed reading texts was the morphological measure, whereas the phonological awareness measure contributed to neither of them. The semantic and syntactic measures contributed only to unpointed text reading fluency. The discussion highlights how readers in script, such as unp...
Source: Journal of Child Language - January 12, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Cohen-Mimran R Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Abstract categories or limited-scope formulae? The case of children's determiners.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTSix tests of the spontaneous speech of twenty-one English-speaking children (1 ; 10 to 2 ; 8; MLUs 1.53 to 4.38) demonstrate the presence of the syntactic category determiner from the start of combinatorial speech, supporting nativist accounts. Children use multiple determiners before a noun to the same extent as their mothers (1) when only a and the or (2) all determiners are analyzed, or (3) when children and mothers are matched on determiner and noun types and determiner+noun tokens. (4) Overlap increases as opportunity for overlap increases: children use multiple determiners with more than 50% of nouns used...
Source: Journal of Child Language - January 5, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Valian V, Solt S, Stewart J Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Editorial.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19094372 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Journal of Child Language)
Source: Journal of Child Language - December 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Edith , Philip Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Activation of syllable units during visual recognition of French words in Grade 2.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe aim of the study was to investigate the syllable activation hypothesis in French beginning readers. Second graders performed a lexical decision task in which bisyllabic words were presented in two colours that either matched the syllable boundaries or not. The data showed that the children were sensitive to syllable match and to syllable complexity. In addition, good readers were slowed down while poor readers were speeded up by syllable match. These findings suggest that syllables are functional units of lexical access in children and that syllable activation is influenced by reading level. PMID: 19079...
Source: Journal of Child Language - December 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Chetail F, Mathey S Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Motion in first language acquisition: Manner and Path in French and English child language*Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTTwo experiments compared how French vs. English adults and children (three to seven years) described motion events. Given typological properties (Talmy, 2000) and previous results (Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Hickmann, 2003; Slobin, 2003), the main prediction was that Manner should be more salient and therefore more frequently combined with Path (MP) in English than in French, particularly with four types of 'target' events, as compared to manner-oriented 'controls': motion up/down (Experiment I, N=200) and across (Experiment II, N=120), arrivals and departures (both experiments). Results showed that MP-response...
Source: Journal of Child Language - December 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Hickmann M, Taranne P, Bonnet P Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Self-repair of speech by four-year-old Finnish children.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to examine what four-year-old children repair in their speech. For this purpose, conversational self-repairs (N=316) made by two typically developing Finnish-speaking children (aged 4 ; 8 and 4 ; 11) were examined. The data comprised eight hours of natural interactions videotaped at the children's homes. The tapes were analyzed using conversation analysis. The children made phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and non-linguistic self-repairs, and also inserted additional material into their utterances. Finnish-speaking children made more syntactic and fewer morphological sel...
Source: Journal of Child Language - December 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Salonen T, Laakso M Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

What is 'word understanding' for the parent of a one-year-old? Matching the difficulty of a lexical comprehension task to parental CDI report.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We report an experiment in which parental report predicts infant performance in a referent identification task at 1 ; 6. Unlike in previous research of this kind (i.e. Houston-Price, Mather & Sakkalou, 2007), infants saw items only once, and image pairs were taxonomic sisters. The match between parental report and infant behaviour provides evidence of the item-level accuracy of both measures of lexical comprehension, and informs our understanding of how British parents interpret standardized Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). PMID: 19079845 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Journal of Child Language)
Source: Journal of Child Language - December 15, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Styles S, Plunkett K Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

The emergence of Dutch connectives; how cumulative cognitive complexity explains the order of acquisition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article focuses on one important linguistic device children have to learn: connectives. The main questions are: Do connectives emerge in a fixed order? And if so, how can this order be explained? In line with Bloom et al. (1980) we propose to explain similarities in the development in terms of cumulative cognitive complexity: complex relations are acquired later than simple ones. Following a cognitive approach to coherence relations, we expect positive relations to be acquired before negatives and additives before temporals and causals. We develop a multidimensional approach to the acquisition process in order to acco...
Source: Journal of Child Language - December 12, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Evers-Vermeul J, Sanders T Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Prosodic patterns in Hebrew child-directed speech.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9-3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns - the number of syllables and stress patterns - is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and closed-class items, but also between these two categories and a third, innovative, class, referred to as between-class items. Results indicate that Hebrew CDS consists mainly of mono- and bisyllabic words, with differences between lexical categories; and that the most comm...
Source: Journal of Child Language - November 13, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Segal O, Nir-Sagiv B, Kishon-Rabin L, Ravid D Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic differentiation can be found even before age two and in simultaneous interactions with distinct language users; (2) whether lexical gaps determine the child's choice of one language over another; and (3) whether her patterns of language choice are affected by the interlocutors language us...
Source: Journal of Child Language - November 12, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Montanari S Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Direct and indirect cues to knowledge states during word learning.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe present study investigated three-year-olds' sensitivity to direct and indirect cues to others' knowledge states for word learning purposes. Children were given either direct, physical cues to knowledge or indirect, verbal cues to knowledge. Preschoolers revealed a better ability to learn words from a speaker following direct, physical cues to their knowledge state. Implications for children's emerging pragmatic competence are discussed. PMID: 19000334 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Journal of Child Language)
Source: Journal of Child Language - November 12, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Saylor MM, Carroll CB Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals

Associations between lexicon and grammar at the end of the second year in Finnish children.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
ABSTRACTThe emergence of grammar in relation to lexical growth was analyzed in a sample of Finnish children (N=181) at 2 ; 0. The Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory was used to gather information on both language domains. The onset of grammar occurred in close association with vocabulary growth. The acquisition of the nominal and verbal inflections of Finnish differed when analyzed in relation to the lexicon in which they are used: the strongest growth in the acquisition of case form types occurred when the nominal lexicon size was roughly between 50 and 250 words, whereas verb inflectional type...
Source: Journal of Child Language - November 12, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Stolt S, Haataja L, Lapinleimu H, Lehtonen L Tags: J Child Lang Source Type: journals