Two-year-old children often start asking questions with where. In this study we test whether children understand where to mean route or absolute location and whether the size of the space or elevation made a difference. Previous research has documented developmental changes over the preschool years in children's non-verbal spatial reasoning. Forty-eight children between two and five years of age were interviewed. We asked them to point in response to where questions about an object, rooms on the same floor and on a different floor. All children pointed to the location of the hidden objects. The youngest children pointed to the route to rooms while the oldest children were more likely to point to the location of rooms. With age, the children gradually used more spatial location terms than deictic terms in response to where. These results suggest that children's meaning of where initially differs for different sized spaces and developmental changes reflect non-verbal cognition.

Commenting on R&T's ‘Developing Linguistic Literacy’ is not an easy task. Their attempt addresses precisely the right questions, in all their complexities and breadth, centring and bundling these questions in strategic and potentially novel ways, and thereby exploring new territories and encouraging investigators to enter these territories. However, I still feel left with a sense of incompleteness and exclusion when it comes to a more discursive orientation to theorizing literacy and development.

APPARENT CONTRADICTIONS, e.g. Did Susan like her supper? – Yes and no, involve asserting and denying the same proposition. They therefore violate the classical LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION, suggesting the use of non-classical INTERPRETIVE STRUCTURES in natural language and reasoning. Experiment 1 explores the range of such interpretive structures available to adults (n = 24) in their reasoning about an apparent contradiction. Experiment 2 uses a similar task to study the emergence of these interpretive structures in young children's reasoning (3;6 to 8;4, n = 48). Results suggest an early facility with resolution strategies relating to OBJECT STRUCTURE (as in, Maybe Susan liked one part of supper but didn't like another part) and an initial tendency to focus on the negative by referring to it first (as in, Maybe Susan didn't like one part of supper but did like another part). We discuss the results in terms of the NATURAL LOGIC of objects and their properties, and the LOGICAL RESOURCES available to young children.

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of 1;11 and 6;7, in correspondence with their caregivers’ speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, 2009). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Persian causatives supports a usage-based account of verb-by-verb learning in child language development.

Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper draws a comprehensive picture of the fact that literacy is a lengthy developing process involving many linguistic factors which sometimes begins even before school age and lasts until adulthood. I very much appreciated the breadth and thoroughness of Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper and, in particular, the fact that they have taken the relationship between oral language and literacy into account. It seems to me that this is rarely the case in current linguistic theories and I would like to offer a few comments on some of the consequences that a serious approach to literacy development would have on the studies of both oral language and literacy, and on linguistic theories themselves as well.

The interrelation of semantic and communicative factors was considered in three children's single-word responses to adult questions. Parents asked more yes/no than naming questions. Children were able to use yes and no appropriately, but did not always do so. The children seemed to have related the form of yes/no questions to the use of yes/no answers, but communicatively were not always willing or able to produce yes/no answers when required. Naming questions were more often followed by appropriate than by inappropriate utterances. The relation of these findings to the importance of naming in early language acquisition, and to the findings of Horgan (1977) and Steffensen (1977) was considered.

Previous developmental studies of conjunction have focused on the syntax of phrasal and sentential coordination (Lust, 1977; de Villiers, Tager-Flusberg & Hakuta, 1977; Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980, among others). The present study examined the flexibility of children's interpretation of conjunction. Specifically, when two predicates that can apply simultaneously to a single individual are conjoined in the scope of a plural definite (The bears are big and white), conjunction receives a Boolean, intersective interpretation. However, when the conjoined predicates cannot apply simultaneously to an individual (The bears are big and small), conjunction receives a weaker ‘split’ interpretation (Krifka, 1990; Lasersohn, 1995; Winter, 1996). Our experiments reveal that preschool-aged children are sensitive to both intersective and split interpretations, and can use their lexical and world knowledge of the relevant predicates in order to select an appropriate reading.

In an increasingly diverse society, young children are likely to speak different first languages that are not the majority language of society. Preschool might be one of the first and few environments where they experience the majority language. The present study investigated how preschool teachers communicate with monolingual English preschoolers and preschoolers learning English as an additional language (EAL). We recorded and transcribed four hours of naturalistic preschool classroom activities and observed whether and how preschool teachers tailored their speech to children of different language proficiency levels and linguistic backgrounds (monolingual English: n = 13; EAL: n = 10), using a suite of tools for analysing quantity and quality of speech. We found that teachers used more diverse vocabulary and more complex syntax with the monolingual children and children who were more proficient in English, showing sensitivity to individual children’s language capabilities and adapting their language use accordingly.

Infant-directed speech often has hyperarticulated features, such as point vowels whose formants are further apart than in adult-directed speech. This increased “vowel space” may reflect the caretaker’s effort to speak more clearly to infants, thus benefiting language processing. However, hyperarticulation may also result from more positive valence (e.g., speaking with positive vocal emotion) often found in mothers’ speech to infants. This study was designed to replicate others who have found hyperarticulation in maternal speech to their 6-month-olds, but also to examine their speech to a non-human infant (i.e., a puppy). We rated both kinds of maternal speech for their emotional valence and recorded mothers’ speech to a human adult. We found that mothers produced more positively valenced utterances and some hyperarticulation in both their infant- and puppy-directed speech, compared to their adult-directed speech. This finding promotes looking at maternal speech from a multi-faceted perspective that includes emotional state.

This study is a validation of the LENA system for the Italian language. In Study 1, to test LENA’s accuracy, seventy-two 10-minute samples extracted from daylong LENA recordings were manually transcribed for 12 children longitudinally observed at 1;0 and 2;0. We found strong correlations between LENA and human estimates in the number of Adult Word Count (AWC) and Child Vocalisations Count (CVC) and a weak correlation between LENA and human estimates in Conversational Turns Count (CTC). In Study 2, to test the concurrent validity, direct and indirect language measures were considered on a sample of 54 recordings (19 children). Correlational analyses showed that LENA’s CVC and CTC were significantly related to the children’s vocal production, a parent report measure of prelexical vocalizations and the vocal reactivity scores. These results confirm that the automatic analyses performed by the LENA device are reliable and powerful for studying language development in Italian-speaking infants.

Production studies show connective acquisition by age 3;0, but comprehension studies show errors until 9;0 or older. To further investigate this gap, two comprehension tasks were carried out with 78 Dutch children between the ages of 7;0 and 10;1, testing contrastive maar ‘but’ and causal want ‘because’ connectives for comparison. An existing context choice task and a task that tested children's ability to interpret pronouns dependent on the connective were used. Children did well on the context choice task for want ‘because’, but performed far below chance with maar ‘but’. In the pronoun interpretation task the youngest children performed at or near chance with both connectives, but show gradual improvement with age. Task complexity may partially explain the results but in general, they are consistent with previous experiments showing contrastive connective comprehension is acquired very late compared to their correct production. Further, the pronoun interpretation task may give a more accurate picture of understanding.

This longitudinal study investigated how lexical restructuring can stimulate emerging bilingual children’s phonological awareness in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Sixty-two English (L1) – French (L2) bilingual children (Mage = 75.7 months, SD = 3.2) were taught new English and French word pairs differing minimally in phonological contrast. The results indicated that increasing lexical specificity in English mediated the relationship between English vocabulary and English phonological awareness both concurrently and longitudinally at the end of Grade 1. A longitudinal relationship was established among French vocabulary, French lexical specificity, and French phonological awareness at the end of Grade 1. Notably, cross-language transfer from English lexical specificity was a better predictor of development in French phonological awareness, especially for words that contained phonological contrasts that occurred in both languages. The results from this study highlight the phonological foundations of early literacy and extend the lexical restructuring hypothesis to emerging bilingual children.

This study mapped the trajectory of developing derivational morphological knowledge in Hebrew monolingual and Russian–Hebrew bilingual children. We investigated 2nd and 4th graders, using a two-by-two structure along the dimensions of modality (comprehension, production) and type of word (real-word, pseudo-word). Performance in the morphological analogies comprehension tasks improved with grade, and monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well. A different pattern was evident in production tasks. In real-word production, monolingual children were more accurate than bilingual children, but this group difference narrowed with age. In pseudo-word production, monolingual children used more morphological elements than bilingual children, and there was also a tendency towards group differences narrowing with age. Detailed error analyses across all tasks revealed that monolingual children recruited more morphological elements than bilingual children. We present implications for assessment of morphological knowledge, and suggest that morphological intervention is a promising avenue for promoting bilingual children’s success.

This study investigates the acquisition of the Imperfective verb inflection paradigm in Emirati Arabic (EA), to determine whether the learning process is sensitive to the phonological and typological properties of the input. We collected data from 48 participants aged 2;7 to 5;9 years, using an elicited production paradigm. Input frequencies of inflectional contexts, verb types and tokens were obtained from corpora of child-directed and adult EA. Children's accuracy was inversely related to the input frequency of inflectional contexts, but not related to type and token frequency or phonological neighborhood density. Token frequency interacted with age, such that younger children performed considerably worse on low-frequency tokens, but older children performed equally well on high- and low-frequency tokens. We conclude that learning is input-driven, but that a sufficiently regular paradigm allows children to eventually generalise across all items earlier than in previously studied European languages.

This study investigated the relation between lexical development and the production of prosodic prominence in disyllabic babble and words. Monthly recordings from nine typically developing Belgian-Dutch-speaking infants were analyzed from the onset of babbling until a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words was reached. The differentiation between the two syllables of isolated disyllabic utterances was computed for f0, intensity, and duration measurements. Results showed that the ambient trochaic pattern emerged in babble, but became enhanced in words. Words showed more prosodic differentiation in terms of f0 and intensity and a more even duration ratio. Age or vocabulary size did not predict the expansion of f0 or intensity in words, whereas vocabulary size was related to the production of more even-timed syllables. The findings are discussed in terms of lexicalist accounts of phonetic development and a potential phonetic highlighting function of first words.