Two experiments are reported, where the development of pragmatic communication skills was assessed in a simple but realistic setting, so that even the youngest speakers could construct consistently accurate messages. It was shown that children of up to six years are specifically hampered by the speaker's use of left and right, but not by the use of named landmarks. Children were also allowed to create their own messages. The ability of the speaker to use language which would be valuable to a particular listener could then be measured. The results show a development between six and seven years in speakers' ability to select and use linguistic forms which are appropriate to listeners' receptive skills, though speakers could use objectively accurate information at an earlier age.

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether oral language skills moderate the effect of Korean phonological awareness (PA) on English PA for Korean preschoolers in the initial stage of learning English as a second language. The study participants comprised 81 five- to six-year-old Korean preschoolers attending Korean-medium preschools in South Korea. The findings demonstrated that Korean PA was significantly associated with English PA. In addition, Korean receptive and expressive language skills had moderating effects on the relationship between Korean PA and English PA, respectively. This study is discussed not only in terms of cross-language PA transfer in processing two phonologically and orthographically different languages but also in light of the importance of native language skills interacting with native PA in the second-language PA development of preschool children in the initial stage of learning a second language.

A test was designed to throw light on how three- to five-year-old Tamil children comprehend two complex sentence types, one of them ambiguous for adult speakers and involving alternating Ns and Vs in surface form (NVNV), the other unambiguous and with clustering Ns and Vs (NNVV). The results indicate that neither of the age groups tested showed adult comprehension of either construction, but apparently relied on certain strategies of perception which are sensitive to features of surface syntactic form rather than to assumed real-world probabilities. The NVNV type yielded the largest proportion of ‘correct’ responses (in terms of the adult model), and also of favoured responses (in terms of syntactic strategies that may be postulated to account for the data); but another relevant variable turned out to be the order in which the constituent structures were probed; probing the internal predicate first enhanced the probability of favoured responses, for both the constructions tested.

Evaluating Brian MacWhinney's multiple ‘solutions’ to the logical problem of language acquisition requires delineating exactly what the alleged problem is. He takes it to stem from the theorems of Gold (1967), the most celebrated of which is G1.

Children aged 7; 6 to 10; 0 were required to solve 2-term relational problems in order to explore developmental changes in the comprehension of Italian positive and negative comparatives. The results indicate that at first children spatially represent the two terms of the positive comparatives in a contrastive-positional way, while in the second phase children represent the terms relationally. Comprehension of negative comparatives is characterized by three phases: a contrastive-positional phase, a presuppositional phase and a relational representation. The older subjects were subsequently divided into two groups based on their previous performance, and required to solve 3-term series problems in order (a) to confirm and extend the result of the first experiment; (b) to examine whether the linguistic comprehension of the comparative was a sufficient and necessary prerequisite for solution of 3-term problems. The developmental sequence of comprehension of comparatives was confirmed. Furthermore, the results suggested how cognitive load in making transitive inferences is influenced by linguistic encoding. The data are discussed in the light of a linguistic model versus a spatial representation model. A developmental version of a spatial representation model is proposed to account for the results.

The study investigates a social–pragmatic expectation that may motivate children to search their environment when asked for the referent of a novel label. In one experimental phase, the experimenter presented 40 two-year-olds a bucket containing a novel object and another visible object – either familiar or novel. The experimenter either asked children for the referent of a novel label, or a non-specific question. In a second experimental phase, all children saw a bucket containing a novel object, and two visible objects – one familiar and one novel. We found that, in both phases, children tended to bypass the visible novel object, preferring instead to search inside the bucket for the referent of a novel label. These findings are consistent with an expectation – dubbed the EXPECTATION OF COMPETENCE – that if an adult asks a child for the referent of a name, it is because the adult likely believes that the child knows that name, and thus the child can expect to be capable of finding its referent.

Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three factors in a sentence repetition task performed by children aged 4–7 and 11–12 years. It was found that semantic plausibility benefitted performance in both age groups; syntactic complexity disadvantaged the younger group but benefitted the older group; while contrary to previous findings, n-gram frequency did not facilitate, and in a post-hoc analysis even hampered, performance. This new evidence suggests that n-gram frequency effects might be restricted to the highly constrained and frequent n-grams used in previous investigations, and that semantics and morphosyntax play a more powerful role than n-gram frequency, supporting the role of abstract linguistic knowledge in children's sentence processing.

This paper sets out to show how facilitation between different clause structures operates over time in syntax acquisition. The phenomenon of facilitation within given structures has been widely documented, yet inter-structure facilitation has rarely been reported so far. Our findings are based on the naturalistic production corpora of six toddlers learning Hebrew as their first language. We use regression analysis, a method that has not been used to study this phenomenon. We find that the proportion of errors among the earliest produced clauses in a structure is related to the degree of acceleration of that structure's learning curve; that with the accretion of structures the proportion of errors among the first clauses of new structures declines, as does the acceleration of their learning curves. We interpret our findings as showing that learning new syntactic structures is made easier, or facilitated, by previously acquired ones.

This study examines lexical and phonological factors that influence word production and pronunciation. Specifically, we investigate whether phonological production (measured by percent consonants correct) contributes to word production and pronunciation over and above the properties of the target words (e.g., word frequency, neighborhood density, and phonetic complexity). Forty French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 1;11 to 3;1, participated in a spontaneous language sample and were administered a naming and a nonword repetition task. Their parents filled out the MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventory (MCDI) and rated their children’s pronunciation on an experimental version of the MCDI. Statistical models indicated that word frequency and the phonetic complexity of the target words influenced whether a word was produced. These factors along with neighborhood density and the children’s production capacities influenced whether a word was pronounced poorly or well. Findings indicate that parents can provide reliable information on the word pronunciation of their children.

Previous studies have shown that caregivers’ sensitive, responsive interactions with young children can boost language development. We explored the association between caregivers’ sensitivity and the vocabulary development of their 8-to-36-month-olds during COVID-19 when family routines were unexpectedly disrupted. Measuring caregivers’ sensitivity from home interaction videos at three timepoints, we found that children who experienced more-sensitive concurrent interactions had higher receptive and expressive vocabularies (N=100). Children whose caregivers showed more-sensitive interactions at the beginning of the pandemic showed greater expressive vocabulary growth six (but not 12) months later (n=58). Significant associations with receptive vocabulary growth were not observed. Our findings highlight the importance of sensitivity at a time when other positive influences on language development were compromised.

Metaphors are key to how children conceptualise the world around them and how they engage socially and educationally. This study investigated metaphor comprehension in typically developing Arabic-speaking children aged 3;01-6;07. Eighty-seven children were administered a newly developed task containing 20 narrated stories and were asked to point at pictures that best illustrated the metaphoric expression. The results were examined through a mixed ANCOVA, testing the effects of chronological age, metaphor type (primary, perceptual) and metaphor conventionality (conventional, novel) on metaphor comprehension. Children could understand some metaphors just after their third birthday, and their comprehension increased with age. Children’s performance was somewhat better on primary than perceptual, and much better on conventional than novel metaphors. These findings are discussed in light of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008) and structure mapping theory (Gentner & Markman, 1997), confirming differences in the acquisition of different metaphor types.

The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old children use the phonetic, phonological, and morphological information available to process noun plural marking in German (i.e., a very complex system) compared to adults. We expected differences with stem vowels, stem-final consonants or different suffixes, alone or in combination, reflecting different processing of their segmental information. Our results show that for plural processing: 1) a suffix is the most helpful cue, an umlaut the least helpful, and voicing does not play a role; 2) one cue can be sufficient and 3) school-age children have not reached adult-like processing of plural marking.

We assess the feasibility of conducting web-based eye-tracking experiments with children using two methods of webcam-based eye-tracking: automatic gaze estimation with the WebGazer.js algorithm and hand annotation of gaze direction from recorded webcam videos. Experiment 1 directly compares the two methods in a visual-world language task with five to six year-old children. Experiment 2 more precisely investigates WebGazer.js’ spatiotemporal resolution with four to twelve year-old children in a visual-fixation task. We find that it is possible to conduct web-based eye-tracking experiments with children in both supervised (Experiment 1) and unsupervised (Experiment 2) settings – however, the webcam eye-tracking methods differ in their sensitivity and accuracy. Webcam video annotation is well-suited to detecting fine-grained looking effects relevant to child language researchers. In contrast, WebGazer.js gaze estimates appear noisier and less temporally precise. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each method and provide recommendations for researchers conducting child eye-tracking studies online.

There is a current ‘theory crisis’ in language acquisition research, resulting from fragmentation both at the level of the approaches and the linguistic level studied. We identify a need for integrative approaches that go beyond these limitations, and propose to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of current theoretical approaches of language acquisition. In particular, we advocate that language learning simulations, if they integrate realistic input and multiple levels of language, have the potential to contribute significantly to our understanding of language acquisition. We then review recent results obtained through such language learning simulations. Finally, we propose some guidelines for the community to build better simulations.

This study investigated the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., this/that, here/there) by 45 children (1;0 – 4;11) learning Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language with an unusually complex demonstrative system. I analyzed 89 10-minute samples from video recordings of child-caregiver interaction, examining how often children and caregivers produced each demonstrative type, as well as relationships among children’s age, children’s demonstrative production, and caregivers’ production. Caregivers’ demonstrative production displayed few relationships with children’s age or production. Children produced speaker-proximal and speaker-distal demonstratives (this near me, that far from me) earlier in developmental time than addressee-proximal demonstratives (that near you), and nominal (this/that) demonstratives earlier than locative (here/there) ones. Compared to caregivers, children overused speaker-proximal demonstratives, but used other demonstrative types with adult-like frequency beginning at 2;0. These results support the view that cognitive biases toward egocentric, proximal, and semantically simpler items substantially influence children’s acquisition of demonstratives.