Phonological selectivity is a phenomenon where children preselect which target words they attempt to produce. The present study examines selectivity in the acquisition of complex onsets and codas in English, and specifically in the acquisition of biconsonantal (CC) clusters in each position compared to triconsonantal (CCC) clusters. The data come from the naturalistic productions of three English-speaking children. The results indicate that children only attempt to produce target tokens with a CCC onset after they have successfully produced target tokens with a CC onset, and that the same occurs in the case of codas. Frequency, morphological complexity, sonority, and /s/ clusters were examined and ruled out as possible explanations of these acquisition patterns. Overall, this suggests that children are selective in their target words, and only attempt to produce words that contain a cluster after they have produced words containing a shorter cluster of the same type (i.e., onset/coda).

This study examined the relations between receptive language development and other developmental domains of preschoolers from low-income families, through an inter-cultural perspective involving the United States and Turkey. A total of 471 children and their caregivers participated in Turkey, while 287 participated in the United States. Children's development was assessed using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire for both samples. Different versions of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test were used for Turkish and US samples, to measure receptive language development. Results revealed similar patterns, with some differences, between the two countries. Receptive language predicted only communication and personal–social scales in the Turkish sample, while the US children's receptive language skills were associated with communication, problem solving, personal–social, and fine and gross motor development scales. These results were discussed in the context of each country, and the comparative conclusions contribute to the extant literature by illustrating the importance of language for three domains.

Little is known about the productive morphosyntax of Norwegian children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The current study examined morphosyntax in Norwegian-speaking children with DLD (n =19) and a control group that was pairwise matched for age, gender, and intelligence quotient (IQ; n = 19). The children’s sentence repetitions were studied through the lens of Processability Theory. The group differences were largest for grammatical structures at the latest developmental stage of the processability hierarchy. The Norwegian subordinate clause word order, belonging to the latest stage of the processability hierarchy, stood out as particularly challenging for children with DLD. Only 2 children with DLD but 16 children in the control group produced a subordinate clause with subordinate clause word order. Categorization of children’s errors revealed that children with DLD made more errors of all types (addition, omission, substitution, inflection and word order) but especially errors of omission and inflection.

Language in touchscreen apps could be useful as an additional source of children’s language input, alongside child directed speech (CDS) and books. Here we performed the first analysis of language in apps, as compared with books and CDS. We analysed language in 18 of the most popular educational apps targeting pre-schoolers and compared their language content to children’s books and CDS with respect to types of constructions and psycholinguistic features of words. We found that apps contained lower frequency words and had lower lexical diversity compared to CDS, and shorter utterances compared to books. Apps may thus provide an enriched supplementary form of input for young children, due to containing less frequent words. However, apps do not expose children to a high proportion of questions and complex sentences, both of which are crucial for supporting child’s development of structurally rich constructions.

We report four act-out experiments testing the sensitivity of adults and three- to five-year-old children to the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in English. Specifically, we test knowledge of the fact that restrictive relative clauses cannot modify a proper name head, and of the fact that relatives introduced by that (as opposed to a wh-pronoun) are obligatorily restrictive. Both children and adults show knowledge of these properties. No support was found for the hypothesis that children extend the block on proper name heads to wh-relatives. Both children and adults are sensitive to the syntactic context (double object vs. existential) in which the relative clause is embedded. However, adults differ from children in four respects. First, in the double object context, adults are more likely than children to commit the error of construing a that relative as referring to a proper name head. Second, the effect of syntactic context on selection of a head is larger for adults than for children. Third, for adults, but not for children, the effect of syntactic context interacts with the type of relative clause. Fourth, adults, but not children, are influenced by whether they hear the existential context before the double object context. We propose that by three to four years of age children have acquired an adult-like grammar of relative clauses, and that the differences we see in child and adult performance can be attributed to that grammar in combination with a mature (adult) or immature (child) sentence processing capacity.

Young children's first attempts at CVC words are often realized with the final consonant being heavily aspirated or followed by an epenthetic vowel (e.g. cat /kæt/ realized as [kæth] or [kætə]). This has led some to propose that young children represent word-final (coda) consonants as an onset-nucleus sequence (CV.Cv) (e.g. Goad & Brannen, 2003), raising questions about the syllabic status of the final consonant. To address this issue, we conducted an acoustic analysis of a child's early production of CVC, CVCh, and CVCV words between the ages of 1;3 and 1;5. Aside from aspiration, the results showed that there were no significant acoustic differences between the CVC and CVCh forms. In contrast, there were systematic acoustic differences in C2 closure duration between the CVC/CVCh and CVCV target words, suggesting that at least some children learning English have early coda representations for monosyllabic CVC words, whether heavily aspirated or not.

The 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.

Auditory processing and spoken word recognition difficulties have been observed in Specific Language Impairment (SLI), raising the possibility that auditory perceptual deficits disrupt word recognition and, in turn, phonological processing and oral language. In this study, fifty-seven kindergarten children with SLI and fifty-three language-typical age-matched controls were assessed with a speech-gating task to measure spoken word recognition, psychophysical tasks to measure auditory Frequency Modulation (FM) detection and Frequency Discrimination (FD), and standardized psychometric tests of phonological processing and oral language. As a group, children with SLI took significantly longer than language-typical controls to recognize words with high neighborhood density, perhaps reflecting subpar phonological representations. FM, but not FD, was significantly worse in SLI. However, while both poorer speech-gating performance and poorer auditory thresholds (FM) were evident in SLI, spoken word recognition did not mediate any relation between auditory perception and either phonological processing or oral language.

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from explicit behavioural measures. Participants were presented with familiar words in audio-visual (AV), audio-only (A-only) or visual-only (V-only) speech modalities, then presented with target and distractor images, and looking to targets was measured. Adults showed high accuracy, with slightly less target-image looking in the V-only modality. Developmentally, looking was above chance for both AV and A-only modalities, but not in the V-only modality until 6 years of age (earlier on /k/-initial words). Flexible use of visual cues for lexical access develops throughout childhood.

Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children’s language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples of children with CI and children with NH were orthographically transcribed by naïve transcribers. The entropy of the transcriptions was computed to analyze their degree of uniformity. The same samples were also rated on a continuous rating scale by another group of adult listeners. The transcriptions of the NH children’s speech were more uniform, i.e., had significantly lower entropy, than those of the CI children, suggesting that the latter group displayed lower intelligibility. This was confirmed by the ratings on the continuous scale. Despite the relatively restricted age ranges, older children reached better intelligibility scores in both groups.

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs (küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs (gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der. Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like weighting preferences for semantic cues (Schumacher, Roberts & Järvikivi, 2017).

Ravid & Tolchinsky are to be applauded for proposing literacy as a central topic in first language acquisition. A synthesis of research in spoken language, in literacy and literacy practices and the lines of enquiry represented in MacWhinney (1999) has interesting consequences for theories of first language acquisition, not least the nativist ones. This response focuses on constructions but a brief list of controversial points in R&T's paper will be useful.

Fikkert (1994) analyzed a large corpus of Dutch children's early language production, and found that they often add targetless syllables to their words in order to create bisyllabic feet. In this note we point out a methodological problem with that analysis: in an important number of cases, epenthetic vowels occur at places where grammatical morphemes (e.g. plural and diminutive suffixes) may be expected. Hence, the seemingly targetless syllables may represent grammatical morphemes. A reanalysis of Fikkert's original data reveals that her rhythmic explanation cannot be maintained if those cases are excluded from the analysis.

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) arguments have instigated considerable debate in the recent linguistics literature. This article uses the comparative method to challenge the logic of POS arguments. Rather than question the premises of POS arguments, the article demonstrates how POS arguments for individual languages lead to a reductio ad absurdum as POS arguments from genetically related languages are compared. Comparison leads to different contradictions for poverty of the negative stimulus (PONS) and poverty of the positive stimulus (POPS) arguments. Comparing PONS arguments leads to the conclusion that Universal Grammar contains language-specific versions of linguistic rules. Comparing POPS arguments leads to the conclusion that Universal Grammar may supply knowledge that is ungrammatical in the target language. The reductio shows that universal principles of grammar cannot be established on the basis of POS arguments from a single language.