The empirical study of word learning is driven by a theoretical debate between lexical constraint and social-pragmatic accounts; it has still not been determined which of these two best explains the evidence. We investigated whether the markedness of a pointing accompanying a verbal reference could help to learn a part name. Participants were 35 two-and-a-half-year-olds, 42 four-and-a-half-year-olds, and 38 undergraduate university students in Japan. The experimenter pointed to a novel part (embedded in a novel whole object) with either “marked” pointing, which was touching the part with a small circular motion, or with usual pointing. Touch accompanied by circular motion reliably elicited learning of part names in all age groups. Usual distal pointing without motion reliably elicited learning of whole object names. The pattern of findings rejects a whole-object constraint in early word learning and demonstrates that marked pointing can promote learning novel part names, supporting a social-pragmatic account.

Children learn words in ambiguous situations, where multiple objects can potentially be referents for a new word. Yet, researchers debate whether children maintain a single word-object hypothesis – and revise it if falsified by later information – or whether children establish a network of word-object associations whose relative strengths are modulated with experience. To address this issue, we presented 4- to 12-year-old children with sets of mutual exclusivity (fast-mapping) trials: offering them with obvious initial hypotheses (that the novel object is the referent for the novel word). We observe that children aged six years and above, despite showing a novelty bias and retaining this novel word – novel object association, also formed an association between the novel word and the name-known object, thereby suggesting that older children attend to more than one word-object association, in a manner similar to associative learning. We discuss our findings in the context of competing theoretical accounts related to word learning.

Research shows that infants and preschoolers can learn novel words equally well through addressed speech as through overhearing two adults. However, most of this research draws from samples of ethnic majority children. The current study compares word learning in preschoolers (M age = 5;6) with an ethnic minority and an ethnic majority background (N = 132). An experimenter of the majority group (representative for most teachers in Flemish education) told a story in three different interaction situations: Addressed Speech, Overhearing Classroom and Overhearing Two Adults. Results show that children of both ethnic groups learn novel words in Addressed Speech and in Overhearing Classroom equally well. However, minority children learned significantly fewer words in Overhearing Two Adults. This study suggests important differences in how ethnic majority and minority children learn through indirect speech in educational (monolingual) settings. In addition, the study scrutinizes the potential role of social identification in overhearing mechanisms.

During vocabulary instruction, it is important to teach words until their representations are robust enough to be retained. For adults, the number of training sessions a target item is successfully retrieved during training predicts the likelihood of post-training retention. To assess this relationship in children, we reanalyzed data from Gordon et al. (2021b, 2022). Four- to six-year-old children completed six training days with word form-object pairs and were tested one month later. Results indicate that the number of training sessions that a word form was retrieved was positively related to post-training retention. We discuss implications for vocabulary instruction and interventions.

Previous research has shown language-specific features play a guiding role in how children develop expression of events with speech and gestures. This study adopts a multimodal approach and examines Mandarin Chinese, a language that features context use and verb serializations. Forty children (four-to-seven years old) and ten adults were asked to describe fourteen video stimuli depicting different types of causal events involving location/state changes. Participants’ speech was segmented into clauses and co-occurring gestures were analyzed in relation to causation. The results show that the older the children, the greater the use of contextual clauses which contribute meaning to event descriptions. It is not until the age of six that children used adult-like structures – namely, using single gestures representing causing actions and aligning them with verb serializations in single clauses. We discuss the implications of these findings for the guiding role of language specificity in multimodal language development.

Turkish-speaking dyzygotic twins (n = 21) and singletons (n = 23) were tested through a standard articulation test to observe whether their consonant articulations were related to their vocabulary sizes, recorded through CDI forms, at age 3;0. Twins were observed to lag behind their singleton peers and performed below the norm level in their production. Vocabulary size failed to predict twins’ articulation scores although it predicted the scores of the singleton group. The results suggested that articulation was not related to vocabulary size in twins. Exposure to sibling language was discussed as an alternative risk factor.

Using the methods of conversation analysis, the opening sequences of a map task in the interactions of sixteen children aged seven to twelve were analyzed. The analytical concerns driving the study were who started, how they started, and how children dealt with differential access to information and the identification of phases within the opening. It was found that all participants oriented to the instruction-giver as the one to start, even when the information-follower commenced the task. With respect to how to start, the older children produced a question and answer sequence or a try-mark to establish a common starting point. Five of the eight younger children inferred a common starting point on the map. Three recurring phases were identified: readiness to begin established through a discourse marker, location of the starting point, and actual instruction. The findings are discussed with reference to the importance of interaction in referential spatial tasks.

The current research examined whether children’s expectations about labeling conventions can be influenced by limited exposure to a foreign language. Three- to four-year-old Korean children were presented with two speakers who each assigned a novel label either in Korean or Spanish to a novel object. Children were asked whether both labels were acceptable for the object. Children who had more exposure to a foreign language through live social interaction, but not through media, were more likely to accept both Korean and Spanish labels. These findings indicate the influence of social interaction in foreign language exposure on children’s understanding of different labeling conventions.

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster for object pictures than for action pictures. For errors, the advantage of objects over actions was greater for younger children. A qualitative analysis of errors was carried out according to a classification derived by Masterson, Druks, and Gallienne (2008). Overall, 25% of the errors reflected a complete lack of knowledge of the names or of the meanings of the pictures. Most errors, however, were likely to be due to a not yet fully developed knowledge of the meaning of words labelling the pictures, or to an incomplete conceptual representation, and this pattern was more marked for action concepts.

The Editor would like to acknowledge the help given by Dr Nenagh Kemp of the Max Planck Institute Child Study Centre in Manchester, in preparing this section of the Journal for publication.

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that children produce words as binary feet. Northern Pame uses obligatory portmanteaux prefixes to inflect nouns for class, number, animacy and possessor. Singular nouns constitute 90 percent of the nouns that the children hear and yet all five two-year-old children frequently omitted the singular noun prefixes, but produced the low frequency noun suffixes for dual and animate plural. Neither the children's production of the noun-class prefixes nor their prefix overextensions correlated with the adult type and token frequencies of production. Northern Pame children constructed Minimal Words that contain binary feet and disfavor the production of initial, extrametrical prefixes.

In this paper we consider the order of emergence of comprehension of wh-questions and polar-questions. We argue that considerations of complexity and input favour the earlier emergence of polar questions; on the other hand, if one assumes that question understanding emerges as a consequence of interactive learning this favours (certain) wh-questions, as well as a small subclass of polar questions. We offer corpus evidence from the Providence corpus that (a certain class of) wh-questions are in fact understood earlier than the polar-questions. We test this observation using elicitation studies on German and Chinese speaking children. Our results confirm the finding from the corpus study and are in line with an interactive learning perspective for the emergence of understanding of questions.

MacWhinney argues that the logical problem of language acquisition is no longer. It was a problem back in the 1970s when the guiding premises of the field were that language structure is highly abstract, that the child's input is a poor source of information about grammar, and that the child's learning mechanisms are inadequate to bridge the gap between the input the child receives and the grammar the child acquires. Now, however, we have new linguistic theories which show that language structure is not abstract but arises from cognition, and we have evidence that input is a rich source of information, and we have reason to believe that the child has a powerful array of learning procedures at his or her disposal. The gap between input and acquisition thought to exist in the 1970s has been closed, and thus, MacWhinney argues, there is no need to attribute innate linguistic knowledge to the child.

Among the various processes that characterize the development of literacy competence presented by Ravid & Tolchinsky in their paper, two are particularly relevant for studies of language development focusing on crosslinguistic sentence processing: (1) the continuity vs. discontinuity between the differential access to oral and written codes within the same language and between languages; (2) the representational status of the conscious access to language provided by the development of literacy, which renders variability more accessible and controllable. In this short note, I shall deal only with the first of these.