This study investigated associations between socioeconomic status (SES), input quality, and bilingual lexical skills of children raised in Maltese-dominant homes. Children aged 3;04-3;08 ( = 38) and their primary caregivers were categorised as low, medium, or high SES. Children's lexical skills were assessed through receptive picture name judgement and picture naming, in Maltese and English. Input quality was measured through type counts sampled during caregiver-child play at home. SES influenced children's English lexical performance, but not Maltese. Aggregated types (Maltese and English) fully mediated SES effects on English picture naming. Maltese types were positively associated with English naming and receptive judgement, suggesting cross-language effects. Further, Maltese and English types had language-specific effects on the respective naming tasks. English type counts, indexing caregiver language mixing, affected Maltese naming negatively. Results support the use of lexically diverse Maltese input in Maltese-dominant homes, complemented by judicious use of English input.

Children appear well positioned to use questions as a tool to learn words. We investigate whether asking questions improves children's word retention compared to listening. Four- to six-year-olds ( = 64, English speaking) were randomly assigned to a Question-Asking or a Listening condition. In both conditions, children were asked to retrieve a novel object from an array of novel objects. In the Question-Asking condition, children were given time to ask questions to help them select the correct object, but in the Listening condition they were not. Participants in both conditions received the same information about the objects, and both groups retained the novel words. Surprisingly, children who had the opportunity to ask questions selected targets at the same rates as those who passively listened. These results provide suggestive evidence that the simple act of asking a question about a new word does not provide a boost for retention.

Causal language is essential for children's language development, helping them understand and explain the reasons behind events. This study focuses on children's causal language production and the role of parental input, aiming to (1) investigate differences in maternal and paternal language use, (2) analyse children's causal language production across tasks and communication partners, and (3) examine the relationship between parental input and children's causal language skills. Sixty children aged 4-5 and their parents participated in dyadic sessions, which included free play, guided play, and storytelling tasks. Results showed that fathers used more causal language than mothers during free play, and children also produced more causal language with their fathers in this context compared to storytelling. Overall, both maternal and paternal causal language inputs were linked to children's causal language production, highlighting the significant influence of parental input on language development.

In view of recent typological work revealing important intra-typological variations among verb-framed languages in motion expression, we investigated children's acquisition of caused motion events in Uyghur. Four-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and adults participated in a cartoon narration task, and analyses of data in terms of syntactic packaging, semantic density, and information focus showed that, while children's use of packaging strategies involving complex syntax (i.e., subordination) - previously found to be challenging for children speaking verb-framed languages - was adult-like from age 8, they continued to diverge from the adult patterns for measures of semantic density and information focus at age 10. We take this developmental asymmetry as emanating from different kinds of knowledge entailed in encoding motion and suggest that they may be on different developmental timelines because they demand differential amount of experience with a language.

Factive islands have been argued to be a late acquired phenomenon (de Villiers et al. (1998). Acquisition of the quantificational properties of mental pedicates. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press), but existing experimental studies have focused on a very limited number of factive verbs and report variation between verbs. Seventy monolingual Romanian-speaking children (split into two age groups: 5-year-old and 7-year-old children) and 15 adults took part in a comprehension task, which tested the (un)availability of adjunct extraction from the clausal complements of both cognitive and emotive factive verbs. The results show that only at age 7 do children begin to observe the restrictions imposed by factive islands, regardless of the sub-type of factive verb, even though they do not reach full mastery of the phenomenon at this age.

The richness of bilingual children's language experience is typically expressed as a composite score using parental questionnaire data. This study unpacks the concept of input richness by examining one such composite score (Q-BEx) to determine whether it reliably predicts children's language abilities, is no more complex than required, and as user-friendly as possible. Data were collected from 173 bilingual children aged 5 to 8 across three countries (France, Netherlands, UK) with various heritage languages in each. Parents completed the Q-BEx questionnaire and children proficiency tasks in their societal language. We analysed the predictive power of the original score compared to several alternative scoring approaches. Results showed (i) these alternatives were not more informative, (ii) scores including qualitative aspects of richness fared better than those with only quantitative variables, (iii) the latent variables underlying richness were comparable across languages, and (iv) whether parental education was included made little difference.

Parental reports and experimental studies indicate that parents speak less to their children in the presence of background television. However, there is a lack of home observations examining the relations between infants' background TV exposure and maternal infant-directed speech. In the current study, 32 infants and their mothers were observed for 60 minutes in their homes at 8, 10, and 18 months of age. Results revealed that the number of words, the number of different words, and the number of questions in infant-directed speech were consistently lower in households with background TV. Furthermore, these aspects of maternal language input were negatively related to the duration of background TV, controlling for families' socioeconomic background. These findings suggest that television may have a negative impact on young children's language development via disrupted parent-child interactions in the presence of background TV in the home environment.

This study explored the acquisition of Spanish nominal morphology in 116 children aged 4;0 to 6;11, grouped according to language ability (developmental language disorder [DLD] and typical development [TD]) and bilingualism (Spanish-English bilingual and Spanish monolingual). Monolinguals produced more target-like articles and direct object clitics than bilinguals, as did children with TD compared to peers with DLD. Bilinguals with TD produced more target-like morphology than monolinguals with DLD, particularly clitics. Children with DLD were more likely to omit clitics than peers with TD, but this contrast did not extend to bilinguals compared to monolinguals. Children produced singular default articles in plural contexts. Overall, our results suggest that clitics function better than articles for identifying DLD in bilinguals on quantitative and qualitative grounds.

While previous studies highlight the role that children's interest in natural categories predicts their learning of new label-object associations in these categories, the long-term implications of such a relationship - the extent to which children's interest shapes lexical development - remain unclear. The current study examines whether children's interests in different natural object categories predict their subsequent interest and the number of words children know in those categories 6 months later. Using data from 67 children tested at 18 and 24 months of age, we found that parents' estimates of interest in natural object categories at 18 months predicted their reports of their child's interests at 24 months. Parent interest reports at 18 months also predicted the number of words that children are reported to know in that category at 24 months. Taken together, this study documents the longitudinal relationship between children's interests, parents' awareness of their children's interests, and later vocabulary development.

is the tendency to acquire nouns earlier than other syntactic categories. Whether it is universal or language and culture dependent is debated. We investigated noun bias in the receptive lexicon of Palestinian-Arabic-learning infants and examined whether maternal input and cultural values are related to lexicon composition beyond the language's structural properties. Thirty-one infants (16-24 months) completed a Computerized Comprehension Task in Palestinian Arabic, and mothers described picture narratives to their children, and completed demographic and cultural values questionnaires. Results showed a noun bias in infants' receptive lexicon. While no significant correlation was found between maternal noun usage and infants' noun bias, higher verb usage significantly correlated with reduced noun bias. Neither maternal education nor cultural values significantly predicted maternal input composition. These findings suggest that while noun bias exists in Palestinian Arabic, exposure to verbs may moderate it, highlighting the complex interplay between language structure, input, and early lexical development.

Linguistic context supports children's verb learning. For example, upon hearing "the boy is ing," children can infer that the novel verb names an action that a boy (rather than a girl) engages in. However, more information, such as a modified subject (e.g. "the boy is ing"), could hinder rather than aid due to increased processing load, as suggested by a previous study with English-learning toddlers (He et al., 2020, 16, 22-42). In the current study, we found that Korean-learning preschoolers also experienced difficulty when the verb appeared with a modified subject compared to an unmodified one; this difficulty persisted across three situational contexts, even when the additional information was necessary to identify the referent. Our findings, with a typologically different language and diverse contexts, provide cross-linguistic support for prior results in English, consistent with a conceptual replication of the idea that less information can sometimes be more beneficial for learning.

Using a priming picture-description, a digital recall and a non-word repetition task, this study tested 18 four- to six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and 25 age-matched typically developing (TD) children to examine the performance of children with DLD in producing grammatical aspect and the links of their performance to verbal working memory (VWM). Results indicated that children with DLD performed worse in producing individual aspect markers than TD children, showing better performance on the preverbal zai- than on the post-verbal markers. They showed better performance in producing imperfective than perfective aspect. Heterogeneous performance was noted in aspectual production within the DLD group, but only performance on -guo and perfective aspect significantly correlated with their VWM. Findings highlight the importance of positional and aspectual distinctions in assessment and intervention for Mandarin-speaking children with DLD, and they provide language-specific evidence for cross-linguistic asymmetries in aspect acquisition in language disorders.

Prediction is a central feature of mature language comprehension, but little is known about how and when it develops. This study investigates whether lexical prediction emerges before seven using a novel, naturalistic cloze task. Five and six-year-old children listened to a storybook and occasionally guessed which word might come next. We selected 180 words from the story that were shown to be more or less predictable in a prior cloze norming task with adults. We found that children frequently guessed the correct word or provided an alternative that was semantically related to the target, demonstrating an ability to use the context to explicitly predict upcoming words. Six-year-olds were more accurate than 5-year-olds. These findings show prediction is present (but still improving) in early childhood, motivating future work on the role of prediction in children's comprehension and learning. Finally, we demonstrate that it is feasible to collect cloze values from children.

Monolingual children tend to assume that a word labels only one object, and this mutual exclusivity supports referent selection and retention of novel words. Bilingual children accept two labels for an object (lexical overlap) for referent selection more than monolingual children, but in these previous studies, information about speakers' language backgrounds was minimal. We investigated monolingual and bilingual 4-year-old children's ability to apply mutual exclusivity and lexical overlap flexibly when objects were labelled either by one or two speakers with the same or different language backgrounds. We tested referent selection and retention of word-object mappings. Both language groups performed similarly for mutual exclusivity, were more likely to accept lexical overlap in the two-language than one-language condition, and performance was similar for referent selection and later retention. Monolingual and bilingual children can adapt their word-learning strategies to cope with the demands of different linguistic contexts.

This retrospective study investigates two questions: (a) whether speech sound difficulties, reported by parents looking back on their children's early speech sound skills and concurrently at ages 7-8, can predict language comprehension and early reading challenges in children identified as poor readers and (b) whether there is a relationship between the type of speech errors and language comprehension and early reading skills in these children. Two hundred twenty-eight children identified as poor readers were assessed on reading and language comprehension. The findings revealed that children whose parents reported early speech sound difficulties, and those with speech sound difficulties at ages 7-8, had significantly poorer language comprehension compared to children without a history of speech sound difficulties. This difference in language comprehension skills persisted after controlling for phoneme awareness. Additionally, both delayed and disordered speech errors significantly predicted difficulties in language comprehension compared to children without speech sound difficulties.

The study explored monolingual German-speaking preschoolers' skills in accusative and dative case marking with local prepositions, the types of errors they made, and whether age can explain their performance. To test the ability of preschoolers (n = 59, age range 4;5-6;5) to mark case assigned by one-case and two-case prepositions, a comprehension and a production task were designed. The children in general performed more accurately on accusative than on dative and on case marking with one-case prepositions than with two-case prepositions. A general production/comprehension asymmetry was not attested. However, the participants revealed the most difficulty in producing dative case and overgeneralized accusative to dative case contexts. Age affected the children's case marking skills, with older children performing more accurately on one-case prepositions than younger children. Thus, the ability to mark case assigned by prepositions in German, especially dative case, is not completed by school entry.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers have difficulty comprehending and producing English plural morphology. This study investigated their comprehension and production of the plural at primary-school age using novel words, to better understand their mental representation of plural morphology. Thirty 5- to 9-year-old DHH children and 31 children with normal hearing (NH) completed a two-alternative forced-choice comprehension task and a production task. Performance was not significantly poorer for DHH children, though some morphophonological contexts proved challenging for both groups. Performance was correlated with vocabulary size. This suggests that, if DHH children have sufficient vocabulary, they may perform like primary school NH peers in plural comprehension and production.

A growing literature explores the representational detail of infants' early lexical representations, but no study has investigated how exposure to real-life acoustic-phonetic variation impacts these representations. Indeed, previous experimental work with young infants has largely ignored the impact of accent exposure on lexical development. We ask how routine exposure to accent variation affects 6-month-olds' ability to detect mispronunciations. Forty-eight monolingual English-learning 6-month-olds participated. Mono-accented infants, exposed to minimal accent variation, detected vowel mispronunciations in their own name. Multi-accented infants, exposed to high levels of accent variation, did not. Accent exposure impacts speech processing at the earliest stages of lexical acquisition.

Words in infant-directed speech (IDS) are often phonetically reduced. This likely renders words harder for infants to learn and recognize. This difficulty might be mitigated by the repetitive nature of IDS, in particular if reduced instances are often preceded by clear instances (i.e., the first-mention effect). To characterize phonetic clarity in American English word repetitions, words were extracted from the IDS of eight mothers and presented to adults (n = 36) who judged their clarity. First mentions of repeated words were found to be clearer than second mentions, though this effect was small. Clarity was rated as greater for less common words and for utterance-final words. Clarity was also greater for words parents thought their child knew. The results help guide intuitions about the phonetic problem infants face when learning their first words.

Encoding -type exclusive focus in discourse involves complex computation and integration of knowledge from multiple linguistic domains. We present a comprehensive analysis of syntactic, semantic, prosodic, and discourse contextual features of 864 utterances with and its Mandarin equivalents produced by Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers and matched monolinguals (age 2-6, Study 1), and by Mandarin-speaking parents (Study 2), all sampled from naturalistic interactions. The results revealed largely target-like syntactic positioning and semantic association of and in both languages in the bilinguals, with cross-linguistic influence between and . Interestingly, the bilingual children, like their Mandarin monolingual peers, employed longer duration but not raised mean pitch to shift the prosodic stress to the intended focus, although both acoustic features, in addition to positional and contextual cues, were instantiated in the focus utterances in the Mandarin parental input, suggesting prolonged development in focus-prosody mapping in children independent of bilingualism.

This study piloted CHIPUTIL, an automated tool in CLAN for analysing sequential lexical overlap in parent-child conversations. In a sample of 44 dyads (child age  = 1;9), child spontaneous lexical overlap was positively associated with parent imitations and expansions, across the conversation and within sequential turns. Children were more than twice as likely to respond with lexical overlap when parents first produced an imitation or expansion. These findings offer insight into how lexical overlap may unfold in early conversations. We discuss implications of automated coding and future directions in exploring the role of lexical overlap in children's language development.