This study investigated links between the development of children’s understanding of ironic comments and their metapragmatic knowledge. Forty-six 8-year-olds completed the short version of the Irony Comprehension Task, during which they were presented with ironic comments in three stories and asked to provide reasons for why the speaker in a story uttered an ironic comment. We coded their responses and compared the results to similar data collected previously with 5-year-olds. Results showed that compared to younger children, 8-year-olds frequently refer to interlocutors’ emotions, intentions, and to metapragmatics. These results support the view that comprehension of verbal irony is an emerging skill in children.

Languages employ different means to manifest the unaccusative-unergative distinction. In Mandarin Chinese, unaccusative verbs are allowed in the inversion construction “V-le NP”, while unergative verbs are not. This grammaticality contrast brings a presence/absence contrast between the two verb classes in the inversion construction in the input. Using an eye fixation task, we investigated whether Mandarin-learning 19-month-olds were sensitive to this specific input frequency contrast. We found that infants distinguished the grammatical versus ungrammatical uses of the two verb classes in the inversion construction “V-le NP” (Experiment 1). When the verb classes were in the “NP V-le” order (Experiment 2) (i.e., the same level of grammaticality), infants showed no evidence of a looking difference. These responses indicate toddlers’ sensitivity to the distribution of the two verb classes in the inversion construction. This distributional information is likely to be one of the potential cues that facilitate their acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction.

What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of or. We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on or uses. Children started producing or between 18-30 months and by 42 months, their rate of production reached a plateau. Second, we annotated for the interpretation of disjunction in child-directed speech. Parents used or mostly as exclusive disjunction, typically accompanied by rise-fall intonation and logically inconsistent disjuncts. But when these two cues were absent, disjunction was generally not exclusive. Our computational modeling suggests that an ideal learner could successfully interpret an English disjunction (as exclusive or not) by mapping forms to meanings after partitioning the input according to the intonational and logical cues available in child-directed speech.

Internal state language (ISL) research contains knowledge gaps, including dimensionality and predictors of growth, addressed here in a two-aim study. Parent-reported expressive language from N = 6,373 monolingual, English-speaking toddlers (Mage = 23.5mos, 46% male, 57% white) was collected using cross-sectional and longitudinal data in WordBank. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggested a best-fitting one-factor model of ISL. The single-factor model of ISL was then submitted to hierarchical linear modeling to evaluate predictors of ISL development. Age 2 ISL production was predicted by child sex, wherein females outperform males, and maternal education, wherein higher education contributes to higher ISL. Only maternal education emerged as a significant predictor of ISL growth. These results provide support to theory suggesting a unitary construct of ISL, as opposed to considering ISL as categorical, and further illustrate linear growth through the second postnatal year that varies as a function of child sex and maternal education.

The present study examined the links between haptic word processing speed, vocabulary, and inhibitory control among bilingual children. Three main hypotheses were tested: faster haptic processing speed, measured by the Computerized Comprehension Task at age 1;11, would be associated with larger concurrent vocabulary and greater longitudinal vocabulary growth. Second, early vocabulary size would be associated with greater vocabulary growth at 3;0 and 5;0. Finally, faster haptic processing speed would be associated with greater concurrent inhibitory control, as measured by the Shape Stroop Task. The results revealed that haptic processing speed was associated with concurrent vocabulary, but not predictive of later language skills. Also, early decontextualized vocabulary was predictive of vocabulary at 3;0. Finally, haptic processing speed measured in the non-dominant language was associated with inhibitory control. These results provide insight on the mechanisms of lexical retrieval in young bilinguals and expand previous research on haptic word processing and vocabulary development.

Sentences that have more than one possible meaning are said to be syntactically ambiguous (SA). Because the correct interpretation of these sentences can be unclear, resolving SA sentences can be cognitively demanding for children, particularly with regards to inhibitory control (IC). In this study we provide three lines of evidence supporting the importance of IC in SA resolution. First, we show that children with higher IC resolve more SA sentences correctly. Second, we show that SA resolution is worse on tasks that place higher demands on IC, even for children with high IC. Third, we show that children with higher IC make different types of SA errors than children with lower IC. This study expands understanding of the cognitive skills underlying language and suggests a need to consider task demands on IC when developing educational curriculums.

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.

In this study, we report an extensive investigation of the structural language and acoustical specificities of the spontaneous speech of ten three- to five-year-old verbal autistic children. The autistic children were compared to a group of ten typically developing children matched pairwise on chronological age, nonverbal IQ and socioeconomic status, and groupwise on verbal IQ and gender on various measures of structural language (phonetic inventory, lexical diversity and morpho-syntactic complexity) and a series of acoustical measures of speech (mean and range fundamental frequency, a formant dispersion index, syllable duration, jitter and shimmer). Results showed that, overall, the structure and acoustics of the verbal autistic children’s speech were highly similar to those of the TD children. Few remaining atypicalities in the speech of autistic children lay in a restricted use of different vocabulary items, a somewhat diminished morpho-syntactic complexity, and a slightly exaggerated syllable duration.

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.

Indirect answers are a common type of non-literal language that do not provide an explicit “yes” or “no” to a question (e.g., “I have to work late” indirectly answered “Are you going to the party?” with a negative response). In the current study, we examined the developmental trajectory of comprehension of indirect answers among 5- to 10-year-old children with typical development. Forty-eight children, 23 boys and 25 girls, between the ages of 5 years; 0 months and 10 years; 11 months (M = 8;2, SD = 19.77 months) completed an experimental task to judge whether a verbally presented indirect answer meant yes or no (Comprehension Task) and then explain their choice (Explanation Task). Responses were scored for accuracy and coded for error analysis. On the Comprehension Task, the 5- to 8-year-olds performed with approximately 85% accuracy, while the 9- and 10-year-olds achieved 95% accuracy. On the Explanation Task, the cross-sectional trajectory revealed three stages: the 5- and 6-year-olds adequately explained indirect answers 32% of the time, the 7- and 8-year-olds performed significantly higher at 55%, and the 9- and 10-year-olds made significant gains than the younger children at 66%. Error analysis revealed that when children fail to interpret speaker intentions appropriately, they repeat the speaker’s utterance or provide an insufficient explanation 80% of the time. Other responses, such as those irrelevant to the context, indicating “I don’t know” or no response, or that were made-up interpretations each accounted for 2%-10% of total inadequate explanations. Study findings indicate discrepancies between task performances and offer two separate sets of baseline data for future comparisons that investigate comprehension or explanation of indirect answers by children with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and by those with varying cognitive and language profiles.

We investigate whether child-directed speech (CDS) contains a higher proportion of canonical pronunciations compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), focusing on Korean noun stem-final obstruent variation. In a word-teaching task, we observed that mothers use a higher rate of canonical pronunciation when addressing infants than when addressing adults. In a follow-up experiment, adults exhibited a higher rate of canonical pronunciation for high- than low-frequency words. Additional analyses conducted with only the high-frequency monosyllabic words from the two experiments found no evidence for simplified phonology in CDS when lexical frequency was controlled for. Our findings suggest that the higher rate of canonical forms in CDS, with respect to Korean morphophonological rules, is mediated by the frequency of word usage. Thus, the didactic function of CDS phonology appears to be a byproduct of mothers using familiar words with children. These results highlight the importance of considering word usage in investigating the nature of CDS.

The purpose of the current study was to revisit a controversial topic: whether frequencies of phonological consonant and vowel classes differ in speech directed to children and to adults. In addition, the current study investigated whether the frequency of phonological consonant and vowel classes changes with children’s increasing chronological and/or developmental age. This study analyzed speech input from 44 adults to four different age groups of listeners (i.e., three groups of children at 6, 18, and 36 months of age and one group of adult listeners) in terms of frequency of occurrence of consonant and vowel classes. Results revealed that consonant stop, nasal, fricative and glide manner classes as well as all four consonant place classes were significantly different in speech directed to the four different age groups. A perspective is discussed to better understand the nature of frequency input of phonological sound classes.

While there are always differences in children’s input, it is unclear how often these differences impact language development – that is, are developmentally meaningful – and why they do (or do not) do so. We describe a new approach using computational cognitive modeling that links children’s input to predicted language development outcomes, and can identify if input differences are potentially developmentally meaningful. We use this approach to investigate if there is developmentally-meaningful input variation across socio-economic status (SES) with respect to the complex syntactic knowledge called syntactic islands. We focus on four island types with available data about the target linguistic behavior. Despite several measurable input differences for syntactic island input across SES, our model predicts this variation not to be developmentally meaningful: it predicts no differences in the syntactic island knowledge that can be learned from that input. We discuss implications for language development variability across SES.

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.

This study explored responsive and linguistic parent input features during parent-child interactions and investigated how four input categories related to children’s production of diverse, simple sentences. Of primary interest was parent use of responsive, simple declarative input sentences. Responsive and linguistic features of parent input to 20 typically developing toddlers at 1;9 were coded during play in a laboratory playroom, then classified into four input categories: responsive, declarative, responsive declarative, and neither responsive nor simple declarative. The percentage of each input category was related to child sentence diversity at 2;6 using Spearman correlations. Parent use of responsive declarative and declarative utterances were both rare. Responsive input was positively correlated with child sentence diversity, and the neither category was negatively correlated with child sentence diversity. The findings provide new support for the importance of balanced conversational turns. Implications for defining both how input is delivered and its linguistic content are discussed.

This study compared school-aged monolingual and bilingual English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in terms of understanding metaphors on recall, multiple-choice, and reasoning tasks. It also examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and understanding metaphors on different measures. A hundred and thirty Persian–Turkish early bilinguals and 122 monolingual Persian-speaking EFL learners took three different tests of metaphor comprehension and the Figural Intersections Test, a test of cognitive capacity. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in terms of cognitive capacity and understanding metaphors on two of the tasks, though with a small effect size. Furthermore, there was a significant positive relationship between cognitive capacity and the scores on the multiple-choice and reasoning tests, but not the recall test. Results suggest that bilingual L3 learners have an edge in understanding metaphors, reflecting a cognitive advantage.

Italian vowels have a shorter duration before a geminate than before a singleton consonant, but a longer duration in syllables carrying stress. We asked whether children can produce the differentiation in vowel duration in singleton/geminate contexts reported for adults and whether their production changes depending on position of primary stress. Italian children (three-to-six-year-olds) and adults performed a nonword repetition. Each nonword appeared in four contexts, with the stressed/unstressed vowel preceding/following the singleton/geminate: /paˈpaso/, /papˈpaso/, ˈpapaso/, /ˈpappaso/. Acoustic analyses on the duration of the vowel preceding (V1) and following (V2) the medial consonant showed a type of consonant by age group interaction: the difference in vowel duration between children and adults was greater for geminate than singleton contexts, and was greater when the vowel carried stress. When V1 carried stress, its duration was shorter in the geminate than in the singleton in adults and older children, not in younger children.

The feature [+spread glottis] ([+s.g.]) denotes that a speech sound is produced with a wide glottal aperture with audible voiceless airflow. Icelandic is unusual in the degree to which [+spread glottis] is involved in the phonology: in /h/, pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops, voiceless fricatives and voiceless sonorants. The ubiquitousness of the feature could potentially affect the rate and process of its acquisition. This paper investigates the development of [+s.g.] in Icelandic, both in general and in a range of contexts, in a cross-sectional study of 433 typically developing Icelandic-speaking children aged two to seven years. As a feature, [+s.g.] is acquired early in Icelandic, although specific sound classes lag behind due to other output constraints. Children reach mastery of [+s.g.] by age three except in word-initial post-aspirated stops and voiceless nasals. Findings are interpreted in light of the literature on the feature and its development.

The relations between socioeconomic status (SES) and language skills at the onset of reading acquisition has not received much attention in research. In this study, a standardized battery of oral and written language tests was administered to 127 Arabic-speaking children at the end of first grade. SES-related differences were found in a line of oral language measures (vocabulary, syntax, morphology, and listening comprehension), but not in phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN), nor in any of the reading components (decoding, word reading, reading comprehension and orthographic knowledge). These findings point to a distinction between two groups of language skills with regard to their relations with SES in the first year of reading instruction. The results imply that SES should not be regarded as a mediating factor in the development of PA, RAN and reading in first grade among novice readers of Arabic.