刊讯｜SSCI 期刊《儿童语言研究》2022年第1-6期

JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE

Volume 49, Issue 1-6, 2022

JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE（SSCI一区，2021 IF：2.701）2022年第1-6期共发文61篇，研究论文主题涉及婴儿抽象语法、双语儿童语音辨别和识字能力、双语儿童词汇能力、儿童语音邻域测量和多音节单词习得、儿童和成人语境敏感性、低收入移民家庭幼儿词汇学习、母亲心理健康与儿童家庭语言环境、学龄前儿童口述故事能力发展、幼儿歌唱促进词汇学习等。欢迎转发扩散！（2022年已更完）

目录

Issue 1

■ Does the maturation of early sleep patterns predict language ability at school entry? A Born in Bradford study, by Victoria C. P. KNOWLAND, Sam BERENS, M. Gareth GASKELL, Sarah A. WALKER, Lisa-Marie HENDERSON

■ Germination, early development, and creativity in the acquisition of the Yucatec Maya deictic system, by Mary Rosa ESPINOSA OCHOA

■ A novel online assessment of pragmatic and core language skills: An attempt to tease apart language domains in children, by Alexander C. WILSON, Dorothy V. M. BISHOP

■ Do infants have abstract grammatical knowledge of word order at 17 months? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese, by Jingtao ZHU, ClicAsia, Julie FRANCK, Luigi RIZZI, Anna GAVARRÓ

■ Phonetic discrimination, phonological awareness, and pre-literacy skills in Spanish–English dual language preschoolers, by Sara A. SMITH, Sibylla LEON GUERRERO, Sarah SURRAIN, Gigi LUK

■ Multilingual toddlers’ vocabulary development in two languages: Comparing bilinguals and trilinguals, by Stephanie L. CÔTÉ, Ana Maria GONZALEZ-BARRERO, Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN

■ The challenge of relational referents in early word extensions: Evidence from noun-noun compounds, by Simon SNAPE, Andrea KROTT

■ Measuring knowledge of multiple word meanings in children with English as a first and an additional language and the relationship to reading comprehension, by Sophie A BOOTON, Alex HODGKISS, Sandra MATHERS, Victoria A MURPHY

■ Phonological neighborhood measures and multisyllabic word acquisition in children, by Melissa RAJARAM

Issue 2

■ The acquisition of prosodic marking of narrow focus in Central Swedish, by Anna Sara H. ROMØREN, Aoju CHEN

■ Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults, by Kristen SYRETT, Rutgers, Athulya ARAVIND

■ Spontaneous verbal repetition in toddler-adult conversations: a longitudinal study with Spanish-speaking two- year-olds, by Marta CASLA, Celia MÉNDEZ-CABEZAS, Ignacio MONTERO, Eva MURILLO, Silvia NIEVA, Jessica RODRÍGUEZ

■ Exploring the Linguistic, Cognitive, and Social Skills Underlying Lexical Processing Efficiency as Measured by the Looking-while-Listening Paradigm, by Samuel RONFARD, Ran WEI, Meredith L. ROWE

■ The role of prosodic and visual information in disambiguating wh-indeterminates: The case of Korean three-year-olds, by Hye-Jung CHO, Jieun KIAER, Naya CHOI, Jieun SONG, 

■ Remembering sentences is not all about memory: Convergent and discriminant validity of syntactic knowledge and its relationship with reading comprehension, by Mads POULSEN, Jessie Leigh NIELSEN, Rikke VANG CHRISTENSEN

■ Naturalistic Use of Aspect Morphology in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children, by Kristina BOWDRIE, Rachael Frush HOLT, Andrew BLANK, Laura WAGNER, 

■ An investigation of iconic language development in four datasets, by David M. SIDHU, Jennifer WILLIAMSON, Velina SLAVOVA, Penny M. PEXMAN

■ Variation awaiting bias: Substantively biased learning of vowel harmony variation, by Youngah DO, Shannon MOONEY

■ Vocabulary production in toddlers from low-income immigrant families: evidence from children exposed to Romanian-Italian and Nigerian English-Italian, by Chiara BARACHETTI, Marinella MAJORANO, Germano ROSSI, Elena ANTOLINI, Rosanna ZERBATO, Manuela LAVELLI

Issue 3

■ What does the Sentence Structure component of the CELF-IV index, in monolinguals and bilinguals? by Cécile DE CAT, Tara MELIA

■ Silence matters: The role of pauses during dyadic maternal and paternal vocal interactions with preterm and full-term infants, by Eliza KIEPURA, Alicja NIEDŹWIECKA, Grażyna KMITA

■ Speaking of State of Mind: Maternal Mental Health Predicts Children's Home Language Environment and Expressive Language, by Brandon Neil CLIFFORD, Laura A. STOCKDALE, Sarah M. COYNE, Vanessa RAINEY, Viridiana L. BENITEZ

■ The Hebrew Web Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI): Lexical Development Growth Curves, by Hila GENDLER-SHALEV, Esther DROMI

■ Effects of emotional cues on novel word learning in typically developing children in relation to broader autism traits, by Melina J WEST, Anthony J ANGWIN, David A COPLAND, Wendy L ARNOTT, Nicole L NELSON

■ “And they had a big, big, very long fight:” The development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional stories told in a peer-group context, by Ageliki NICOLOPOULOU, Hande ILGAZ, Marta SHIRO, Lisa B. HSIN, 

■ Singing to infants matters: Early singing interactions affect musical preferences and facilitate vocabulary building, by Fabia FRANCO, Chiara SUTTORA, Maria SPINELLI, Iryna KOZAR, Mirco FASOLO, 

■ Running or crossing? Children's expression of voluntary motion in English, German, and French, by Henriëtte HENDRIKS, Maya HICKMANN, Carla PASTORINO-CAMPOS

■ Jellybeans… or Jelly, Beans…? 5-6-year-olds can identify the prosody of compounds but not lists, by Nan XU RATTANASONE, Ivan YUEN, Rebecca HOLT, Katherine DEMUTH

■ A broadened estimate of syntactic and lexical ability from the MB-CDI, by Trevor K.M. DAY, Jed T. ELISON, by Trevor K.M. DAY, Jed T. ELISON

Issue 4

■ Maternal mind-mindedness and communicative functions in free-play and mealtime contexts: Stability, continuity and relations with child language at 16 months, by Emiddia LONGOBARDI, Pietro SPATARO, Martina CALABRÒ

■ Phonological vs. natural gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German–Russian), by Tanja KUPISCH, Natalia MITROFANOVA, Marit WESTERGAARD

■ Input effects in the acquisition of verb inflection: Evidence from Emirati Arabic, by Marta SZREDER, Laura E. DE RUITER, Dimitrios NTELITHEOS

■ Code-switching in parents’ everyday speech to bilingual infants, by Lena V. KREMIN, Julia ALVES, Adriel John ORENA, Linda POLKA, Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN

■ Sources of variation at the onset of bilingualism: The differential effect of input factors, AOA, and cognitive skills on HL Arabic and L2 English syntax, by Adriana SOTO-COROMINAS, Evangelia DASKALAKI, Johanne PARADIS, Magdalena WINTERS-DIFANI, Redab AL JANAIDEH

■ Revisiting the Acquisition of Onset Complexity: Affrication in Québec French, by Natália Brambatti GUZZO

■ Variation sets in the speech directed to toddlers in Argentinian households.SES and type of activity effects, by Florencia ALAM, Celia Renata ROSEMBERG, Leandro GARBER, Alejandra STEIN

■ Children's comprehension of prosodically marked focus in Hungarian: How mandatory syntactic focus-marking affects the trajectory of acquisition, by Balázs SURÁNYI,  Lilla PINTÉR

■ Socio-cognitive engagement (but not socioeconomic status) predicts preschool children's language and pragmatic abilities, by Cornelia SCHULZE, Henrik SAALBACH

Issue 5

■ Converging Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Agreement, by Lisa B. HSIN, Nayeli GONZALEZ-GOMEZ, Isabelle BARRIÈRE, Thierry NAZZI, Geraldine LEGENDRE

■ Russian–German five-year-olds: What omissions in sentence repetition tell us about linguistic knowledge, memory skills and their interrelation, by Elizabeth STADTMILLER, Katrin LINDNER, Assunta SÜSS, Natalia GAGARINA

■ Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children: a meta-analysis, by Chantal VAN DIJK, Elise VAN WONDEREN, Elly KOUTAMANIS, Gerrit Jan KOOTSTRA, Ton DIJKSTRA, Sharon UNSWORTH

■ The influence of prominence cues in 7- to 10-year-olds’ pronoun resolution: Disentangling order of mention, grammatical role, and semantic role, by Liam P. BLYTHING, Maialen IRAOLA AZPIROZ, Shanley ALLEN, Regina HERT, Juhani JÄRVIKIVI

■ Developmental differences in perceptual anticipation underlie different sensitivities to coarticulatory dynamics, by Stella KRÜGER, Aude NOIRAY

■ Acquisition of variability in Akan Phonology: Labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels, by Wendy Kwakye AMOAKO, Joseph Paul STEMBERGER

■ Collocational knowledge in children: a comparison of English-speaking monolingual children, and children acquiring English as an Additional Language, by Nick RICHES, Carolyn LETTS, Hadeel AWAD, Rachel RAMSEY, Ewa DĄBROWSKA

■ Investigating the Mechanisms Driving Referent Selection and Retention in Toddlers at Typical and Elevated Likelihood for Autism Spectrum Disorder, by Teodora GLIGA, Alex SKOLNICK, Ute LIERSCH, Tony CHARMAN, Mark H JOHNSON, Rachael BEDFORD, The BASIS Team

■ Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system: a meta-analysis, by Leonardo PIOT, Naomi HAVRON, Alejandrina CRISTIA

■ Two-year-olds at elevated risk for ASD can learn novel words from their parents, by Rianne VAN ROOIJEN, Emma Kate WARD, Maretha DE JONGE, Chantal KEMNER, Caroline JUNGE

Issue 6

■ Pragmatic, linguistic and cognitive factors in young children's development of quantity, relevance and word learning inferences, by Elspeth WILSON, Napoleon KATSOS

■ Toddlers raised in multi-dialectal families learn words better in accented speech than those raised in monodialectal families, by Natalia KARTUSHINA, Audun ROSSLUND, Julien MAYOR

■ Is there a bilingual disadvantage for word segmentation? A computational modeling approach, by Laia FIBLA, Nuria SEBASTIAN-GALLES, Alejandrina CRISTIA, 

■ Variation in quality of maternal input and development of coda stops in English-speaking children in Singapore, by Jasper Hong SIM, Brechtje POST

■ Child-directed and overheard input from different speakers in two distinct cultures, by Georgia LOUKATOU, Camila SCAFF, Katherine DEMUTH, Alejandrina CRISTIA, Naomi HAVRON

■ Determinants of early lexical acquisition: Effects of word- and child-level factors on Dutch children's acquisition of words, by Josje VERHAGEN, Mees VAN STIPHOUT, Elma BLOM

■ Young minds’ quest for regularity: Evidence from the Turkish causative, by Mine NAKİPOĞLU, Berna A. UZUNDAĞ, Özge SARIGÜL

■ Consonant articulation and vocabulary size: Twins versus singletons, by F. Nihan KETREZ

■ ¡Casi te caístes!: Variation in second person singular preterit forms in Spanish Children, by Elisabeth BAKER

■ Improvements of Statistical Learning Skills Allow Older Children to Go Beyond Single-Hypothesis Testing When Learning Words, by Ming Yean SIA, Julien MAYOR

■ The development of narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children aged 4 to 9: a longitudinal study, by Josefin LINDGREN

■ Children's Understanding of Proper Names and Descriptions, by Kristan A. MARCHAK, D. Geoffrey HALL

摘要

Does the maturation of early sleep patterns predict language ability at school entry? A Born in Bradford study

Victoria C. P. KNOWLAND,Department of Psychology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK

Sam BERENS, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, BN1 9QH, UK

M. Gareth GASKELL, Department of Psychology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK

Sarah A. WALKER, Department of Psychology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK

Lisa-Marie HENDERSON, Department of Psychology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK

Abstract Children's vocabulary ability at school entry is highly variable and predictive of later language and literacy outcomes. Sleep is potentially useful in understanding and explaining that variability, with sleep patterns being predictive of global trajectories of language acquisition. Here, we looked to replicate and extend these findings. Data from 354 children (without English as an additional language) in the Born in Bradford study were analysed, describing the mean intercepts and linear trends in parent-reported day-time and night-time sleep duration over five time points between 6 and 36 months-of-age. The mean difference between night-time and day-time sleep was predictive of receptive vocabulary at age five, with more night-time sleep relative to day-time sleep predicting better language. An exploratory analysis suggested that socioeconomic status was predictive of vocabulary outcomes, with sleep patterns partially mediating this relationship. We suggest that the consolidation of sleep patterns acts as a driver of early language development.

Germination, early development, and creativity in the acquisition of the Yucatec Maya deictic system

Mary Rosa ESPINOSA OCHOA, Institute of Philological Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Abstract The Yucatec Maya language has a highly complex deictic system with interesting typological differences that in addition to demonstratives and locative adverbs also includes ostensive evidentials and modal adverbs. Given that deictic words are among the first that children produce, the aim of this study is to identify the early acquisition that Yucatec Mayan children follow to map out each deictic form. Deictic words taken from spontaneous, longitudinal, transversal corpora and Gaskins's (1990) field work annotations were labeled and analyzed. The results show that children begin by uttering protoforms mapped with prototypical functions of locative and modal adverbs, but the functions of both demonstratives and ostensive evidentials are expressed mostly with the same protoform, which is similar to the deictic organizations of other languages. When children become productive, they overextend functions, which demonstrates a reanalysis of the system before acquisition is complete.

Key words Deixis, Yucatec Maya, early acquisition, overextensions

A novel online assessment of pragmatic and core language skills: An attempt to tease apart language domains in children

Alexander C. WILSON, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK

Dorothy V. M. BISHOP, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, UK

Abstract It remains unclear whether pragmatic language skills and core language skills (grammar and vocabulary) are distinct language domains. The present work aimed to tease apart these domains using a novel online assessment battery administered to almost 400 children aged 7 to 13 years. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that pragmatic and core language domains could be measured separately, but that both domains were highly related (r = .79). However, zero-order correlations between pragmatic tests were quite small, indicating that task-specific skills played an important role in performance, and follow-up exploratory factor analysis suggested that pragmatics might be best understood as a family of skills rather than a domain. This means that these different pragmatic skills may have different cognitive underpinnings and also need to be assessed separately. However, our overall results supported the idea that pragmatic and core aspects of language are closely related during development, with one area scaffolding development in the other.

Key words Language development, pragmatics, assessment

Do infants have abstract grammatical knowledge of word order at 17 months? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese.

Jingtao ZHU, Departament de Filologia Catalana, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

ClicAsia, Centre d´Estudis Orientals, Barcelona, Spain

Julie FRANCK, Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique, Université de Genève, Switzerland

Luigi RIZZI, Departament de Linguistique, Université de Genève, Switzerland, Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Cognitivi sul Linguaggio, Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy

Anna GAVARRÓ, Departament de Filologia Catalana, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Abstract We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.

Key words eye-tracking, word order, Mandarin Chinese, sensitivity to ungrammaticality, abstract grammatical knowledge

Phonetic discrimination, phonological awareness, and pre-literacy skills in Spanish–English dual language preschoolers

Sara A. SMITH, University of South Florida, USA

Sibylla LEON GUERRERO, Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA

Sarah SURRAIN, Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA

Gigi LUK, McGill University, Canada

Abstract The current study explores variation in phonemic representation among Spanish–English dual language learners (DLLs, n = 60) who were dominant in English or in Spanish. Children were given a phonetic discrimination task with speech sounds that: 1) occur in English and Spanish, 2) are exclusive to English, and 3) are exclusive to Russian, during Fall (age m = 57 months) and Spring (age m = 62 months, n = 42). In Fall, English-dominant DLLs discriminated more accurately than Spanish-dominant DLLs between English-Spanish phones and English-exclusive phones. Both groups discriminated Russian phones at or close to chance. In Spring, however, groups no longer differed in discriminating English-exclusive phones and both groups discriminated Russian phones above chance. Additionally, joint English-Spanish and English-exclusive phonetic discrimination predicted children's phonological awareness in both groups. Results demonstrate plasticity in early childhood through diverse language exposure and suggest that phonemic representation begins to emerge driven by lexical restructuring.

Multilingual toddlers’ vocabulary development in two languages: Comparing bilinguals and trilinguals

Stephanie L. CÔTÉ, Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada， Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Concordia University, Canada

Ana Maria GONZALEZ-BARRERO, Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada， Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Concordia University, Canada

Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN, Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada,Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Concordia University, Canada

Abstract Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals’ vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual (n = 170) and trilingual (n = 20) toddlers aged 17–33 months growing up in a bilingual community where both French and English are spoken. We hypothesized that because trilinguals have reduced input in French and English due to time spent hearing their third language, they would have smaller French–English vocabulary sizes than bilinguals. Trilinguals produced on average 2/3 of the number of words in these languages that bilinguals did: however, this difference was not statistically robust due to large levels of variability. Follow-up analyses did, however, indicate a relationship between input quantity and vocabulary size. Our results indicate that similar factors contribute to vocabulary development across toddlers regardless of the number of languages being acquired.

Key words Multilinguals, Vocabulary Development, Language Input

The challenge of relational referents in early word extensions: Evidence from noun-noun 

Simon SNAPE, School of Psychology, University of Chester, UK

Andrea KROTT, School of Psychology, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK

Abstract Young children struggle more with mapping novel words onto relational referents (e.g., verbs) compared to non-relational referents (e.g., nouns). We present further evidence for this notion by investigating children's extensions of noun-noun compounds, which map onto combinations of non-relational referents, i.e., objects (e.g., baby and bottle for baby bottle), and relations (e.g., a bottle FOR babies). We tested two- to five-year-olds’ and adults’ generalisations of novel compounds composed of novel (e.g., kig donka) or familiar (e.g., star hat) nouns that were combined by one of two relations (e.g., donka that has a kig attached (=attachment relation) versus donka that stores a kig (=function relation)). Participants chose between a relational (shared relation) and a non-relational (same colour) match. Results showed a developmental shift from encoding non-relational aspects (colour) towards relations of compound referents, supporting the challenge of relational word referents. Also, attachment relations were more frequently encoded than function relations.

Key words Noun-noun compounds, compound-nouns, relational word referents, relational shift

Measuring knowledge of multiple word meanings in children with English as a first and an additional language and the relationship to reading comprehension

Sophie A BOOTON, Department of Education, University of Oxford, UK

Alex HODGKISS, Department of Education, University of Oxford, UK

Sandra MATHERS, Department of Education, University of Oxford, UK

Victoria A MURPHY, Department of Education, University of Oxford, UK

Abstract Polysemy, or the property of words having multiple meanings, is a prevalent feature of vocabulary. In this study we validated a new measure of polysemy knowledge for children with English as an additional language (EAL) and a first language (EL1) and examined the relationship between polysemy knowledge and age, language status, and reading comprehension. Participants were 112 British children aged 5 to 6 (n = 61) or 8 to 9 years (n = 51), 37% of whom had EAL (n = 41). Participants completed the new measure of knowledge of polysemes, along with other measures of language, literacy and cognitive ability. The new measure was reliable and valid with EAL and EL1 children. Age and language status predicted children's polyseme knowledge. Polyseme knowledge uniquely contributed to reading comprehension after controlling for age, language status, non-verbal intelligence, time reading in English, and breadth of vocabulary. This research underscores the importance of polysemy for children's linguistic development.

Key words polysemy, second language, vocabulary

Phonological neighborhood measures and multisyllabic word acquisition in children

Melissa RAJARAM, The University of Texas at Dallas

Abstract Multisyllabic words constitute a large portion of children's vocabulary. However, the relationship between phonological neighborhood density and English multisyllabic word learning is poorly understood. We examine this link in three, four and six year old children using a corpus-based approach. While we were able to replicate the well-accepted positive association between CVC word acquisition and neighborhood density, no similar relationship was found for multisyllabic words, despite testing multiple novel neighborhood measures. This finding raises the intriguing possibility that phonological organization of the mental lexicon may play a fundamentally different role in the acquisition of more complex words.

Key words multisyllabic, neighborhood density, word acquisition

The acquisition of prosodic marking of narrow focus in Central Swedish

Anna Sara H. ROMØREN, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway

Aoju CHEN, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Abstract We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were elicited in sentence-medial and sentence-final focus conditions via a semi-spontaneous elicitation task. The children largely performed in an adult-like manner already at four to five: they predominantly added prominence H to focal words and avoided this tone post-focally in both sentence-medial and sentence-final position. The placement or avoidance of prominence H had largely the same effects on pitch range for children and adults. Finally, the four to eight-year-olds also increased the duration of the focal word, similar to adults. Hence, Central Swedish-speaking children master the use of prosody for focus marking at an earlier age, compared to children acquiring a West Germanic language.

Key words acquisition, development, focus marking, prosody, Central Swedish

Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults

Kristen SYRETT, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey–New Brunswick, USA

Athulya ARAVIND, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Abstract Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun. We advance a new account, appealing to theoretical proposals about underspecification in nominal semantics and the role of the discourse context. Our results demonstrate that there are limits to which children allow partial objects to serve as wholes, and that under certain conditions, adult performance resembles that of children by allowing in partial objects. We propose that children's behavior is in fact licensed by the inherent context dependence of count nouns.

Key words Objects, count nouns, nominals, sortals, context, semantics

Spontaneous verbal repetition in toddler-adult conversations: a longitudinal study with Spanish-speaking two- year-olds

Marta CASLA, Dpto. Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación. Facultad de Psicología. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.

Celia MÉNDEZ-CABEZAS, Dpto. Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación. Facultad de Psicología. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.

Ignacio MONTERO, Dpto. Psicología Social y Metodología. Facultad de Psicología. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.

Eva MURILLO, Dpto. Psicología Básica. Facultad de Psicología. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.

Silvia NIEVA, Dpto. de Psicología Experimental, Procesos Cognitivos y Logopedia. Facultad de Psicología.Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

Jessica RODRÍGUEZ, Dpto. Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación. Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.

Abstract The role of children’s verbal repetition of parents’ utterances on vocabulary growth has been well documented (Masur, 1999). Nevertheless, few studies have analyzed adults’ and children’s spontaneous verbal repetition around the second birthday distinguishing between the types of repetition. We analyzed longitudinally Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads during spontaneous interaction at 21, 24 and 30 months. Linguistic level was measured using the Spanish version of the MacArthur CDI (López-Ornat et al., 2005). Children’s and adults’ repetitions are about 17% of the speech. Children repeated adults’ utterances in a reduced manner whereas adults produced more extended repetitions. Adults’ rate of repetition predicted children’s linguistic level at 30 months. Children’s rate of repetition did not predict linguistic level. These results suggest that parents adapt their speech to children’s communicative abilities. Since children’s rate of repetition did not predict linguistic level, we suggest that verbal imitation plays an indirect and complex role in communicative development.

Exploring the Linguistic, Cognitive, and Social Skills Underlying Lexical Processing Efficiency as Measured by the Looking-while-Listening Paradigm

Samuel RONFARD, University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada

Ran WEI, Harvard University, USA

Meredith L. ROWE, Harvard University, USA

Abstract The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers’ lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials (target-initial versus distractor-initial trials) are differentially associated with the abovementioned potential correlates of LPE. We tested 18- to 24-month-olds and found that children's word learning on a fast-mapping task was associated with LPE measures from all trials and distractor-initial trials but not target-initial trials. Children's vocabulary and pragmatic skills were both associated with their fast-mapping performance. Executive functions and pragmatic skills were associated with LPE measures from distractor-initial but not target-initial trials. Hence, LPE as measured by the LWL paradigm may reflect a constellation of skills important to language development. Methodological implications for future studies using the LWL paradigm are discussed.

Key words lexical processing efficiency, looking-while-listening, vocabulary, executive functions, pragmatic development

The role of prosodic and visual information in disambiguating wh-indeterminates: The case of Korean three-year-olds

Hye-Jung CHO, Department of Child Development and Family Studies, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

Jieun KIAER, Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Naya CHOI, Department of Child Development and Family Studies, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

Jieun SONG, Department of Speech, Hearing & Phonetic Sciences, University College London, UK, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

Abstract In Korean language, questions containing ambiguous WH-WORDS may be interpreted as either wh-questions or yes-no questions. This study investigated 43 Korean three-year-olds’ ability to disambiguate eight indeterminate questions using prosodic and visual cues. The intonation of each question provided a cue as to whether it should be interpreted as a wh-question or a yes-no question. The questions were presented alongside picture stimuli, which acted as either a matched (presentation of corresponding auditory-visual stimuli) or a mismatched contextual cue (presentation conflicting auditory-visual stimuli). Like adults, the children preferred to comprehend questions involving ambiguous wh-words as wh-questions, rather than yes-no questions. In addition, children were as effective as adults in disambiguating indeterminate questions using prosodic cues regardless of the visual cue. However, when confronted with conflicting auditory-visual stimuli (mismatched), the quality of children's responses was less accurate than adults’ responses.

Key words prosodic cue, contextual cue, young children, disambiguation, wh-phrases, Korean

Remembering sentences is not all about memory: Convergent and discriminant validity of syntactic knowledge and its relationship with reading comprehension

Mads POULSEN, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. 

Jessie Leigh NIELSEN, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. 

Rikke VANG CHRISTENSEN, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. 

Abstract Recent studies have found correlations between sentence-level tests and reading comprehension. However, the task demands of sentence-level tests are not well understood. The present study investigated syntactic knowledge as a construct by examining the convergent and discriminant validity of two sentence-level tasks, sentence comprehension and sentence repetition, designed to test syntactic knowledge and their relation with reading comprehension. Results from 86 Grade 6 students showed that the syntax tests were more highly correlated with each other than with tests of working memory and vocabulary. This suggests that the syntax measures tap into a set of skills that are at least partially separate from these other cognitive constructs. Furthermore, syntactic knowledge explained unique variance in reading comprehension beyond controls. The syntax tasks were working memory dependent, but working memory was not the primary reason why syntax tasks are correlated with reading comprehension.

Key words syntax, sentence comprehension, reading comprehension

Naturalistic Use of Aspect Morphology in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Kristina BOWDRIE, The Ohio State University, USA

Rachael Frush HOLT, The Ohio State University, USA

Andrew BLANK, The Ohio State University, USA

Laura WAGNER, The Ohio State University, USA

Abstract Grammatical morphology often links small acoustic forms to abstract semantic domains. Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children have reduced access to the acoustic signal and frequently have delayed acquisition of grammatical morphology (e.g., Tomblin, Harrison, Ambrose, Walker, Oleson & Moeller, 2015). This study investigated the naturalistic use of aspectual morphology in DHH children to determine if they organize this semantic domain as normal hearing (NH) children have been found to do. Thirty DHH children (M = 6;8) and 29 NH children (M = 5;11) acquiring English participated in a free-play session and their tokens of perfective (simple past) and imperfective (-ing) morphology were coded for the lexical aspect of the predicate they marked. Both groups showed established prototype effects, favoring perfective + telic and imperfective + atelic pairings over perfective + atelic and perfective + atelic ones. Thus, despite reduced access to the acoustic signal, this DHH group was unimpaired for aspectual organization.

Key words aspect, hearing loss, verb morphology

An investigation of iconic language development in four datasetse

David M. SIDHU, University of Calgary, Canada

Jennifer WILLIAMSON, University of Calgary, Canada

Velina SLAVOVA, New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria

Penny M. PEXMAN, University of Calgary, Canada

Abstract Iconic words imitate their meanings. Previous work has demonstrated that iconic words are more common in infants’ early speech, and in adults’ child-directed speech (e.g., Perry et al., 2015; 2018). This is consistent with the proposal that iconicity provides a benefit to word learning. Here we explored iconicity in four diverse language development datasets: a production corpus for infants and preschoolers (MacWhinney, 2000), comprehension data for school-aged children to young adults (Dale & O'Rourke, 1981), word frequency norms from educational texts for school aged children to young adults (Zeno et al., 1995), and a database of parent-reported infant word production (Frank et al., 2017). In all four analyses, we found that iconic words were more common at younger ages. We also explored how this relationship differed by syntactic class, finding only modest evidence for differences. Overall, the results suggest that, beyond infancy, iconicity is an important factor in language acquisition.

Variation awaiting bias: Substantively biased learning of vowel harmony variation

Youngah DO, Department of Linguistics, The University of Hong Kong

Shannon MOONEY, Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Georgetown University, USA

Abstract This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children favor harmony pattern in their production of the languages. In the language where harmony is non-dominant, children's subsequent production entirely reverses the pattern so that harmony predominates. This differs starkly from adults. Our results compare to the regularization found in child learning of morphosyntactic variation, suggesting a role for naturalness in variable phonological learning.

Key words learning biases, phonology, substantive bias, variation, artificial language learning

Vocabulary production in toddlers from low-income immigrant families: evidence from children exposed to Romanian-Italian and Nigerian English-Italian

Chiara BARACHETTI, University of Verona, Italy

Marinella MAJORANO, University of Verona, Italy

Germano ROSSI, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Elena ANTOLINI, Pedagogical Coordination of the Nursery Schools and Preschools, Municipality of Verona, Italy

Rosanna ZERBATO, Pedagogical Coordination of the Nursery Schools and Preschools, Municipality of Verona, Italy

Manuela LAVELLI, University of Verona, Italy

Abstract The relationship between first and second language in early vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children is still debated in the literature. This study compared the expressive vocabulary of 39 equivalently low-SES two-year-old bilingual children from immigrant families with different heritage languages (Romanian vs. Nigerian English) and the same majority language (Italian). Vocabulary size, vocabulary composition and translation equivalents (TEs) were assessed using the Italian/L1 versions of the CDI. Higher vocabulary in Italian than in the heritage language emerged in both groups. Moreover, Romanian-Italian-speaking children produced higher proportions of TEs than Nigerian English-Italian-speaking children, suggesting that L1-L2 phonological similarity facilitates the acquisition of cross-linguistic synonyms.

Key words bilingual vocabulary, toddlers, low-income families, immigrant families

What does the Sentence Structure component of the CELF-IV index, in monolinguals and bilinguals?

Cécile DE CAT, University of Leeds, UK

Tara MELIA, University of Leeds, UK

Abstract The Sentence Structure sub-test (SST) of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) aims to “measure the acquisition of grammatical (structural) rules at the sentence level”. Although originally designed for clinical practice with monolingual children, components of the CELF, such as the SST, are often used to inform psycholinguistic research. Raw scores are also commonly used to estimate the English proficiency of bilingual children. This study queries the reliability of the SST as an index of children's ability to deal with structural complexity in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates that cognitive complexity induces a considerable confound in the task, affecting 5- to 7-year-old monolinguals (n = 87) and bilinguals (n = 87) alike.

Silence matters: The role of pauses during dyadic maternal and paternal vocal interactions with preterm and full-term infants

Eliza KIEPURA, Institute of Mother and Child, Warsaw, Poland

Alicja NIEDŹWIECKA, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Grażyna KMITA, Institute of Mother and Child, Warsaw, Poland, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract This study examined the characteristics of the vocal behaviors of parents and preterm infants, as compared to their term-born peers, at three months of age. Potential links between specific features of parental IDS and infants’ vocal activity were also sought. We analyzed the frequencies and durations of vocalizations and pauses during the dyadic interactions of 19 preterm and 19 full-term infants with their mothers and fathers. The results showed that the duration of the vocalizations was shorter for the preterm than for the full-term infants, regardless of the interactive partner. Mothers vocalized more frequently and for a longer time than fathers, regardless of the group, but only the frequency of paternal utterances was significantly and positively correlated with the frequency and duration of infant vocalizations. Frequent conversational pauses of a relatively short total duration seemed to be related to more active infants’ vocal participation, regardless of prematurity and parent gender.

Key words preterm infant, vocal interactions, pauses in vocal interactions

Speaking of State of Mind: Maternal Mental Health Predicts Children's Home Language Environment and Expressive Language

Brandon Neil CLIFFORD, T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 873701, Tempe, AZ, 85287-3701, USA

Laura A. STOCKDALE, School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, 2091 JFSB, Provo, UT84602, USA

Sarah M. COYNE, School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, 2091 JFSB, Provo, UT84602, USA

Vanessa RAINEY, Department of Psychology, University of West Florida, 11000 University Parkway, Pensacola, FL32514, USA

Viridiana L. BENITEZ, Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, 950 S. McAllister Ave., Tempe, AZ85287, USA

Abstract Maternal depression and anxiety are potential risk factors to children's language environments and development. Though existing work has examined relations between these constructs, further work is needed accounting for both depression and anxiety and using more direct measures of the home language environment and children's language development. We examined 265 mother-infant dyads (49.6% female, Mage = 17.03 months) from a large city in the Western United States to explore the relations between self-reports of maternal depression and anxiety and observational indices of the home language environment and expressive language as captured by Language Environment Analysis (LENA) and parent-reported language comprehension and production. Results revealed maternal depressive symptoms to be negatively associated with home language environment and expressive language indices. Maternal anxiety symptoms were found to be negatively associated with children's parent-reported language production. These findings provide further evidence that maternal mental health modulates children's home language environments and expressive language.

Key words language environment, expressive language, maternal depression, maternal anxiety

The Hebrew Web Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI): Lexical Development Growth Curves

Hila GENDLER-SHALEV, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Haifa, Israel

Esther DROMI, Constantiner School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Abstract This article presents data on lexical development of 881 Israeli Hebrew-speaking monolingual toddlers ages 1;0 to 2;0. A Web-based version of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (H-MB-CDI) was used for data collection. Growth curves for expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, actions and gestures were characterized. Developmental trajectories of toddlers with various demographic characteristics, such as education, income, religiosity level, birth order of the child, and child-care arrangements were compared. Results show that the lexical growth curves for Hebrew are comparable to those reported for other languages. Sex, birth order, and child-care arrangements were found to influence the size of lexicons. It is recommended that the trajectories presented here be used as norms for lexical growth among typical Hebrew-speaking toddlers in the second year of life.

Effects of emotional cues on novel word learning in typically developing children in relation to broader autism traits

Melina J WEST, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Anthony J ANGWIN, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

David A COPLAND, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, University of Queensland Center for Clinical Research, Brisbane, Australia

Wendy L ARNOTT, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Nicole L NELSON, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Abstract Emotion can influence various cognitive processes. Communication with children often involves exaggerated emotional expressions and emotive language. Children with autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced tendency to attend to emotional information. Typically developing children aged 7 to 9 years who varied in their level of autism-like traits learned the nonsense word names of nine novel toys, which were presented with either happy, fearful, or neutral emotional cues. Emotional cues had no influence on word recognition or recall performance. Eye-tracking data showed differences in visual attention depending on the type of emotional cues and level of autism-like traits. The findings suggest that the influence of emotion on attention during word learning differs according to whether the children have lower or higher levels of autism-like traits, but this influence does not affect word learning outcomes.

Key words emotion, word learning, language, broader autism phenotype

“And they had a big, big, very long fight:” The development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional stories told in a peer-group context

Ageliki NICOLOPOULOU, Lehigh University, USA

Hande ILGAZ, Bilkent University, Turkey

Marta SHIRO, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuela & Florida Atlantic University, USA

Lisa B. HSIN, Harvard University, USA

Abstract This study examined the development of evaluative language in preschoolers’ oral fictional narratives using a storytelling/story-acting practice where children told stories to and for their friends. Evaluative language orients the audience to the teller's cognitive and emotional engagement with a story's events and characters, and we hypothesized that this STSA context might yield new information about the early development of this language, prior to elementary school. We analyzed 60 stories: the first and last story told by 10 children in each of three preschool classrooms (3-, 4-, and 5-year-old classes) that used STSA throughout the school year. Stories were coded for evaluative expressions and evidential expressions. Five-year-olds used significantly more evaluative language than did 3-year-olds, and children at all ages used significantly more evaluative language at the end than at the beginning of the year. The number of stories told throughout the year explained unique variance in children's evaluative language growth.

Key words evaluative expressions, evidential expressions, subjectivity, preschoolers, oral fictional stories, peer-group context, storytelling/story-acting practice

Singing to infants matters: Early singing interactions affect musical preferences and facilitate vocabulary building

Fabia FRANCO, Department of Psychology, Middlesex University, London, UK

Chiara SUTTORA, Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

Maria SPINELLI, Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Science, University G. d'Annunzio Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy

Iryna KOZAR, Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

Mirco FASOLO, Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Science, University G. d'Annunzio Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy

Abstract This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants’ performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to instrumental and sung versions of the same novel tunes whilst the parents completed an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing home musical interactions with their infants. Language development was assessed with a follow-up when the infants were 14-month-old (n = 26). The main results showed that 6-month-olds preferred listening to sung rather than instrumental melodies, and that self-reported high levels of parental singing with their infants [i] were associated with less pronounced preference for the sung over the instrumental version of the tunes at 6 months, and [ii] predicted significant advantages on the language outcomes in the second year. The results are interpreted in relation to conceptions of developmental plasticity.

Key words family music, song, language acquisition, infant preferences

Running or crossing? Children's expression of voluntary motion in English, German, and French

Henriëtte HENDRIKS, University of Cambridge, UK

Maya HICKMANN, CNRS & UniversityParis 8, France

Carla PASTORINO-CAMPOS, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract Much research has focused on the expression of voluntary motion (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000). The present study contributes to this body of research by comparing how children (three to ten years) and adults narrated short, animated cartoons in English and German (SATELLITE-FRAMED languages) vs. French (VERB-FRAMED). The cartoons showed agents displacing themselves in variable Manners along different Paths (Path saliency and variance were specifically manipulated in four item types). Results show an increase with age across languages in how much information participants expressed. However, at all ages, more motion information was encoded in English and German than in French. Furthermore, language-specific features impacted the content and its organization within utterances in discourse, showing more variation within and across Path types in French than in the satellite-framed languages, resulting in later achievement of adult-like descriptions in this language. The discussion highlights the joint impact of cognitive and typological features on language development.

Jellybeans… or Jelly, Beans…? 5-6-year-olds can identify the prosody of compounds but not lists

Nan XU RATTANASONE, Department of Linguistics and Centre for Language Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia

Ivan YUEN, Department of Linguistics and Centre for Language Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia

Rebecca HOLT, Department of Linguistics and Centre for Language Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia

Katherine DEMUTH, Department of Linguistics and Centre for Language Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia

Abstract Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in PRODUCTION, at least for early-acquired noun-noun compounds (Yuen et al., 2021). This raises the question of whether children this age can also use naturally-produced prosody to IDENTIFY noun-noun compounds from their list forms in comprehension. The results show that 5-6-year-olds (N = 28) can only identify compounds. Unlike adults, children as a group could not use boundary cues to identify lists and were significantly slower in their processing compared to adults. This suggests that the acquisition of word level prosody may precede the acquisition of phrase level prosody, i.e., some higher-level aspects of phrasal prosody may take longer to acquire.

Key words compound prosody, prosodic boundary, comprehension, eye-tracking, child language acquisition

A broadened estimate of syntactic and lexical ability from the MB-CDI

Trevor K.M. DAY, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Jed T. ELISON, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, Department of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Abstract A critical question in the study of language development is to understand lexical and syntactic acquisition, which play different roles in speech to the extent it would be natural to surmise they are acquired differently. As measured through the comprehension and production of closed-class words, syntactic ability emerges at roughly the 400-word mark. However, a significant proportion of the developmental work uses a coarse combination of function and content words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI). Using the MB-CDI Wordbank database, we implemented a factor analytic approach to distinguish between lexical and syntactic development from the Words and Sentences (WS) form that involves both function words and the explicit categorizations. Although the Words and Gestures (WG) form did not share the factor structure, common WG/WS elements recapitulate the expected age-related changes. This parsing of the MB-CDI may prove simple, yet fruitful in subsequent investigation.

Key words language acquisition, lexical development, syntactic development, toddlers

Maternal mind-mindedness and communicative functions in free-play and mealtime contexts: Stability, continuity and relations with child language at 16 months

Emiddia LONGOBARDI, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Pietro SPATARO, Department of Economy, Universitas Mercatorum, Rome, Italy

Martina CALABRÒ, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Abstract The present study aimed at investigating the contextual stability, the contextual continuity and the concurrent associations between maternal measures (general language, communicative functions and mind-mindedness) and child measures (total number of word types and tokens) in two different contexts, free-play and mealtime. To this purpose, the interactions occurring between 25 mothers and their 16-month-old children in each context were video-recorded, transcribed and later coded for the selected measures. Significant contextual stability was observed in the mothers’ production of general language measures (total number of utterances, total number of words and MLU), in the children's production of word types and tokens, and in some communicative functions (Tutorial, Control and Asynchronous). No contextual stability was found for the mothers’ production of attuned mind-related comments. For continuity, both mothers and children produced more utterances and words in the free-play than in the mealtime context; the production of attuned mind-related comments and the use of the Control function were also more frequent in the free-play context. Lastly, the analysis of the concurrent correlations indicated that, especially in the mealtime context, the number of words produced by children was positively associated with the number of words produced by mothers and by their use of the Tutorial and Didactic functions, but negatively associated with their use of the Control function. The mothers’ production of attuned mind-related comments bore no relation with children's expressive language. Similarities and differences with previous findings are discussed.

Key words contextual stability, continuity, mind-mindedness: communicative functions, free-play vs. mealtime context

Phonological vs. natural gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German–Russian)

Tanja KUPISCH, University of Konstanz, Germany, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

Natalia MITROFANOVA, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

Marit WESTERGAARD, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Abstract We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues compared to other languages, and children have been argued to acquire semantic and phonological rules in tandem. German–Russian bilingual children face the challenge of acquiring two different gender assignment systems simultaneously. We tested 45 bilingual children (ages 4–10 years) and monolingual controls. Results show that the children are clearly sensitive to phonological cues, while semantic cues play a minor role. However, monolingual and bilingual children have different defaulting strategies, with monolinguals defaulting to neuter and bilinguals to feminine gender.

Key words gender assignment, transparency, nonce words, cue mismatch, crosslinguistic influence

Input effects in the acquisition of verb inflection: Evidence from Emirati Arabic

Marta SZREDER, Department of Speech Language Pathology, United Arab Emirates University

Laura E. DE RUITER, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University, USA

Dimitrios NTELITHEOS, Department of Speech Language Pathology, United Arab Emirates University

Abstract This study investigates the acquisition of the Imperfective verb inflection paradigm in Emirati Arabic (EA), to determine whether the learning process is sensitive to the phonological and typological properties of the input. We collected data from 48 participants aged 2;7 to 5;9 years, using an elicited production paradigm. Input frequencies of inflectional contexts, verb types and tokens were obtained from corpora of child-directed and adult EA. Children's accuracy was inversely related to the input frequency of inflectional contexts, but not related to type and token frequency or phonological neighborhood density. Token frequency interacted with age, such that younger children performed considerably worse on low-frequency tokens, but older children performed equally well on high- and low-frequency tokens. We conclude that learning is input-driven, but that a sufficiently regular paradigm allows children to eventually generalise across all items earlier than in previously studied European languages.

Key words verb inflection, morphological acquisition, acquisition of Arabic, input-driven learning, frequency effects

Code-switching in parents’ everyday speech to bilingual infants

Lena V. KREMIN, Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada, Center For Research on Brain, Language and Music, Canada

Julia ALVES, Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada

Adriel John ORENA, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada

Linda POLKA, Center For Research on Brain, Language and Music, Canada， School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Canada

Krista BYERS-HEINLEIN, Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada， Center For Research on Brain, Language and Music, Canada

Abstract Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents’ code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French–English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. Overall, rates of infant-directed code-switching were low, averaging 7 times per hour (6 times per 1,000 words) at 10 months and increasing to 28 times per hour (18 times per 1,000 words) at 18 months. Parents code-switched more between sentences than within a sentence; this pattern was even more pronounced when infants were 18 months than when they were 10 months. The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant's understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual language acquisition.

Key words code-switching, bilingualism, parental speech, LENA

Sources of variation at the onset of bilingualism: The differential effect of input factors, AOA, and cognitive skills on HL Arabic and L2 English syntax

Adriana SOTO-COROMINAS, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Evangelia DASKALAKI, University of Alberta, Canada

Johanne PARADIS, University of Alberta, Canada

Magdalena WINTERS-DIFANI, University of Alberta, Canada

Redab AL JANAIDEH, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada

Abstract Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee children (N = 119) recently arrived in Canada using a sentence repetition task. Regression analyses showed that a partially overlapping set of child-level (input and cognitive skills) and language-level (syntactic structure) factors accounted for performance in each language. HL performance was particularly sensitive to language, cognitive, and input variables indexing cumulative HL exposure. L2 performance, however, was sensitive to cognitive and environmental variables indexing current and cumulative L2 use. Finally, despite stronger performance in Arabic than in English, results revealed interdependence between the two languages, indicating that participants with stronger syntactic abilities in their HL tended to have stronger syntactic abilities in their emerging L2.

Revisiting the Acquisition of Onset Complexity: Affrication in Québec French

Natália Brambatti GUZZO, Department of Linguistics, McGill University

Abstract I investigate the acquisition of affrication in Québec French (QF), where affricates are in complementary distribution with coronal stops, being realized before high front vowels and glides. Previous research on other languages shows that affricates are acquired before branching onsets, which supports the idea that complexity at the level of the segment is acquired before complexity at the level of the syllable (Lleó & Prinz, 1997). In contrast, I hypothesize that affricates are acquired after branching onsets in QF, as learners are required to understand the constraints on their distribution. I examine longitudinal data from two QF-speaking children for whom the acquisition of branching onsets has been previously analyzed (Rose, 2000). Results show that affricates are indeed acquired after branching onsets, consistent with the hypothesis. Overapplication errors indicate that children make generalizations about the phonological constraints on affrication from an early age, which is expected for the acquisition of rules.

Key words affrication, branching onsets, syllable structure, Québec French

Variation sets in the speech directed to toddlers in Argentinian households.SES and type of activity effects

Florencia ALAM, National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CIIPME-CONICET) University of Buenos Aires

Celia Renata ROSEMBERG, National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CIIPME-CONICET) University of Buenos Aires

Leandro GARBER, National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CIIPME-CONICET) University of 3 de Febrero

Alejandra STEIN, National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CIIPME-CONICET) University of Buenos Aires

Abstract The study adopts a naturalistic perspective, looking at the relationship between socio-economic status (SES), activities and variation sets in child-directed speech (CDS) to Spanish-speaking Argentinian toddlers. It aims to determine the effect of SES and type of activity on the proportion of words and utterances in variation sets and on the pragmatic function they serve in interaction. Thirty two children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours and the middle two hours were analyzed using CLAN. We developed an automatic algorithm for variation sets extraction that compares noun, verb and adjective lexemes in successive utterances. Mixed-effects beta regression showed SES and activity type effects on the proportion of variation sets and on the pragmatic function served by variation sets. Findings revealed that the contextual variables considered impact on how interlocutors organize the information to young children at the local level of natural at home interactions.

Key words toddlers, partial self-repetitions, SES, input, naturalistic study

Children's comprehension of prosodically marked focus in Hungarian: How mandatory syntactic focus-marking affects the trajectory of acquisition

Balázs SURÁNYI, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics & Pázmány Péter Catholic University

Lilla PINTÉR, Pázmány Péter Catholic University & Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics

Abstract This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.

Key words prosodic focus-marking, syntactic focus-marking, focus comprehension, full competence, Hungarian

Socio-cognitive engagement (but not socioeconomic status) predicts preschool children's language and pragmatic abilities

Cornelia SCHULZE, Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Leipzig, Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig, Germany

Henrik SAALBACH, Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Leipzig, Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, Leipzig, Germany

Abstract Parental socioeconomic status (SES) strongly influences children's language abilities but less is known about its influence on pragmatic abilities (e.g., inferring intentions from relevance implicatures). Moreover, by focussing on SES, the role of socio-cognitive engagement (e.g., joint parent-child interactions) has been overlooked.We tested four- and six-year-old children (n = 92) with a communication task, a questionnaire assessed parents’ SES and socio-cognitive engagement.Socio-cognitive engagement predicted children's communication abilities while the parental educational background and income did not. This emphasizes the notion that communication is a highly socio-cognitive task, one which children perform the better the more frequently they engage in socio-cognitive interactions.

Key words indirect communication, relevance inference, SES, parental education, pragmatic abilities

Converging Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Agreement

Lisa B. HSIN, Harvard University / American Institutes for Research, USA

Nayeli GONZALEZ-GOMEZ, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Isabelle BARRIÈRE, Molloy College / Yeled V'Yalda Early Childhood Center, USA

Thierry NAZZI, Université Paris Descartes, France

Geraldine LEGENDRE, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Abstract A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3rd-person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e., medial vs. final position). Accuracy and sensitivity analyses show that comprehension performance correlates with SV agreement production abilities, and that comprehension of singular and plural third-person forms is not influenced by the sentential position of the agreement morpheme. Issues of the appropriate outcome measure and the role of structural familiarity in the development of abstract representations are discussed.

Key words language acquisition, comprehension-production asymmetry, Spanish, subject-verb agreement, word order

Russian–German five-year-olds: What omissions in sentence repetition tell us about linguistic knowledge, memory skills and their interrelation

Elizabeth STADTMILLER, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany

Katrin LINDNER, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany

Assunta SÜSS, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany

Natalia GAGARINA, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany

Abstract In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word omissions were analyzed. Serial order effects were found in both languages: medial errors made up the largest percentage of errors. Then, the position of omissions was compared to visuo-verbal n-back working memory and non-verbal visual forward short-term memory scores using stepwise hierarchical linear regression models, taking into account demographic variables and receptive language. The interaction differed between languages: there was a significant negative association between omissions in the medial position in German and the final position in Russian and the visuo-verbal n-back memory score. Our study contributes to the understanding of how working memory and language are intertwined in sentence repetition.

Key words sentence repetition task, omission patterns, serial order effects, n-back memory, five-year-old bilinguals

Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children: a meta-analysis

Chantal VAN DIJK, Radboud University, Centre for Language Studies, Netherlands

Elise VAN WONDEREN, Radboud University, Netherlands

Elly KOUTAMANIS, Radboud University, Centre for Language Studies, Netherlands

Gerrit Jan KOOTSTRA, Radboud University, Centre for Language Studies, Netherlands

Ton DIJKSTRA, Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour & Centre for Language Studies, Netherlands

Sharon UNSWORTH, Radboud University, Centre for Language Studies, Netherlands

Abstract Although cross-linguistic influence at the level of morphosyntax is one of the most intensively studied topics in child bilingualism, the circumstances under which it occurs remain unclear. In this meta-analysis, we measured the effect size of cross-linguistic influence and systematically assessed its predictors in 750 simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children in 17 unique language combinations across 26 experimental studies. We found a significant small to moderate average effect size of cross-linguistic influence, indicating that cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of bilingual development. Language dominance, operationalized as societal language, was a significant predictor of cross-linguistic influence, whereas surface overlap, language domain and age were not. Perhaps an even more important finding was that definitions and operationalisations of cross-linguistic influence and its predictors varied considerably between studies. This could explain the absence of a comprehensive theory in the field. To solve this issue, we argue for a more uniform method of studying cross-linguistic influence.

Key words cross-linguistic influence, bilingual children, surface overlap, morphosyntax, meta-analysis

The influence of prominence cues in 7- to 10-year-olds’ pronoun resolution: Disentangling order of mention, grammatical role, and semantic role

Liam P. BLYTHING, Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Canada

Maialen IRAOLA AZPIROZ, Department of Social Sciences, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Shanley ALLEN, Department of Social Sciences, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

Regina HERT, Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Canada

Juhani JÄRVIKIVI, Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Canada

Abstract 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).

Key words pronoun comprehension, eye tracking, semantic role

Developmental differences in perceptual anticipation underlie different sensitivities to coarticulatory dynamics

Stella KRÜGER, Linguistic Department, Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

Aude NOIRAY, Linguistic Department, Laboratory for Oral Language Acquisition, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, United States

Abstract Anticipatory coarticulation is an indispensable feature of speech dynamics contributing to spoken language fluency. Research has shown that children speak with greater degrees of vowel anticipatory coarticulation than adults – that is, greater vocalic influence on previous segments. The present study examined how developmental differences in anticipatory coarticulation transfer to the perceptual domain.Using a gating paradigm, we tested 29 seven-year-olds and 93 German adult listeners with sequences produced by child and adult speakers, hence corresponding to low versus high vocalic anticipatory coarticulation degrees. First, children predicted vowel targets less successfully than adults. Second, greater perceptual accuracy was found for low compared to highly coarticulated speech. We propose that variations in coarticulation degrees reflect perceptually important differences in information dynamics and that listeners are more sensitive to fast changes in information than to a large amount of vocalic information spread across long segmental spans.

Key words speech perception, language development, vocalic coarticulation

Acquisition of variability in Akan Phonology: Labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels

Wendy Kwakye AMOAKO, University of Alberta, Canada

Joseph Paul STEMBERGER, University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the low-frequency variant involves a front rounded vowel which is expected to be mastered relatively early. Late mastery of complex consonants was confirmed. The high-frequency labiopalatalized-consonant variant was absent at age 3 and not yet mastered even at age 5. All children produced the easier-to-produce low-frequency front-rounded-vowel variant, most at far greater frequency than in adult speech, implying that a child's output limitations can affect which variant the child targets for production. Modular theories, in which phonological plans reflect only the characteristics of adult input, fail to account for our results. Non-modular theories are implicated.

Key words phonological development, variability, frequency, segmental complexity, Akan

Collocational knowledge in children: a comparison of English-speaking monolingual children, and children acquiring English as an Additional Language

Nick RICHES, Newcastle University, UK

Carolyn LETTS, Newcastle University, UK

Hadeel AWAD, Newcastle University, UK

Rachel RAMSEY, Northumbria University, UK

Ewa DĄBROWSKA, Northumbria University, UK

Abstract Collocations, e.g., apples and pears, hard worker, constitute an important avenue of linguistic enquiry straddling both grammar and the lexicon. They are sensitive to language experience, with adult L2 learners and children learning English as an Additional Language (EAL) exhibiting poor collocational knowledge. The current study piloted a novel collocational assessment with children (mean age 6;3, 40 monolingual, 32 EAL). It investigated (1) the feasibility of a collocational assessment at this age, (2) whether collocational knowledge is associated with other language domains (receptive grammar and vocabulary), and (3) whether collocational knowledge is more affected than other domains. The assessment demonstrated good psychometric properties and was highly correlated with performance in other domains, indicating shared psycholinguistic mechanisms. Unlike adult counterparts, the EAL children performed equally poorly across domains. Given the role played by collocations in vocabulary development and reading, a focus on this domain may be beneficial for EAL children.

Key words English as an additional language, collocations, syntax

Investigating the Mechanisms Driving Referent Selection and Retention in Toddlers at Typical and Elevated Likelihood for Autism Spectrum Disorder

Teodora GLIGA, Department of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Alex SKOLNICK, Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom

Ute LIERSCH, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Tony CHARMAN, Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom

Mark H JOHNSON, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Rachael BEDFORD, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom, Department of Psychology, University of Bath, United Kingdom

The BASIS Team, Department of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

Abstract It was suggested that children's referent selection may not lay memory traces sufficiently strong to lead to retention of new word-object mappings. If this was the case we expect incorrect selections to be easily rectified through feedback. Previous work suggested this to be the case in toddlers at typical likelihood (TL) but not in those at elevated likelihood (EL) for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Bedford et al., 2013). Yet group differences in lexical knowledge may have confounded these findings. Here, TL (N = 29) and EL toddlers (N = 75) chose one of two unfamiliar objects as a referent for a new word. Both groups retained the word-referent mapping above chance when their choices were immediately reinforced but were at chance after corrective feedback. The same pattern of results was obtained when children observed another experimenter make the initial referent choice. Thus, children's referent choices lay memory traces that compete with subsequent correction; these strong word-object associations are not a result of children actively choosing potential referents for new words.

Key words referent selection, word learning, Autism Spectrum Disorders, corrective feedback, toddlers

Socioeconomic status correlates with measures of Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system: a meta-analysis

Leonardo PIOT, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d'Etudes cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France

Naomi HAVRON, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d'Etudes cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France, University of Haifa, Israel

Alejandrina CRISTIA, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d'Etudes cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France

Abstract Using a meta-analytic approach, we evaluate the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and children's experiences measured with the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system. Our final analysis included 22 independent samples, representing data from 1583 children. A model controlling for LENATM measures, age and publication type revealed an effect size of rz= .186, indicating a small effect of SES on children's language experiences. The type of LENA metric measured emerged as a significant moderator, indicating stronger effects for adult word counts than child vocalization counts. These results provide important evidence for the strength of association between SES and children's everyday language experiences as measured with an unobtrusive recording analyzed automatically in a standardized fashion.

Key words SES, LENA, experiences, production, input, language environment, meta-analysis

Two-year-olds at elevated risk for ASD can learn novel words from their parents

Rianne VAN ROOIJEN, Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Netherlands, Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Emma Kate WARD, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Maretha DE JONGE, Clinical Neurodevelopmental Sciences, Leiden University, Netherlands, Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Center Utrecht, Netherlands

Chantal KEMNER, Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Netherlands, Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Netherlands, Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Center Utrecht, Netherlands

Caroline JUNGE, Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Netherlands, Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Abstract Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have smaller vocabularies in infancy compared to typically-developing children. To understand whether their smaller vocabularies stem from problems in learning, our study compared a prospective risk sample of 18 elevated risk and 11 lower risk 24-month-olds on current vocabulary size and word learning ability using a paradigm in which parents teach their child words. Results revealed that both groups learned novel words, even though parents indicated that infants at elevated risk of ASD knew fewer words. This suggests that these early compromised vocabularies cannot be solely linked to difficulties in word formations.

Key words word-object mapping, parents, infants, autism spectrum disorder, eye-tracking

Pragmatic, linguistic and cognitive factors in young children's development of quantity, relevance and word learning inferences

Elspeth WILSON, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

Napoleon KATSOS, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract To better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development, studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and cognitive factors are required. We investigated three- to five-year-old English-speaking children's (N = 71) performance in ad hoc quantity, scalar quantity and relevance implicatures, as well as word learning by exclusion inferences, using a sentence-to-picture-matching story-based task. Children's pragmatic abilities improved with age, with word learning by exclusion acquired first, followed by relevance and ad hoc quantity implicatures, and finally scalar quantity implicatures. In an exploratory analysis (with a subset of the data N = 58), we found that structural language knowledge was a predictor of pragmatic performance (but no evidence for an association with socioeconomic status or Theory of Mind, controlling for structural language). We discuss reasons why this developmental pattern emerges with reference to linguistic and extra-linguistic properties of these inferences.

Key words Pragmatic development, relevance implicature, quantity implicature, word learning by exclusion

Toddlers raised in multi-dialectal families learn words better in accented speech than those raised in monodialectal families

Natalia KARTUSHINA, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo Forskningsveien 3A, Harald Schjelderups hus, 0373 Oslo, Norway, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, Niels Henrik Abels vei 36, 0313 Oslo, Norway

Audun ROSSLUND, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, Niels Henrik Abels vei 36, 0313 Oslo, Norway

Julien MAYOR, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo Forskningsveien 3A, Harald Schjelderups hus, 0373 Oslo, Norway

Abstract Multi-accent environments offer rich but inconsistent language input, as words are produced differently across accents. The current study examined, in two experiments, whether multi-accent variability affects infants’ ability to LEARN WORDS and whether toddlers’ prior experience with accents modulates learning. In Experiment 1, two-and-a-half-year-old Norwegian toddlers were exposed, in their kindergarten, twice per day for one week, to a child-friendly audiovisual tablet-based e-book containing four novel pseudowords. Half of the toddlers heard the story in three Norwegian accents, whereas the other half heard it in one Norwegian accent. The results revealed no differences between conditions, suggesting that multi-accent variability did not hinder toddlers’ word learning. In experiment 2, two-and-a-half-year-old Norwegian toddlers were exposed, in their homes, for one week, to the e-book featuring three Norwegian accents. The results revealed overall better learning in toddlers raised in bi-dialectal households, as compared to mono-dialectal peers – suggesting that accent exposure benefits learning in multi-accent environments.

Key words multi-accent, word learning, book reading, accent variability, e-book

Is there a bilingual disadvantage for word segmentation? A computational modeling approach

Laia FIBLA, School of Psychology, The University of East Anglia, UK, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France

Nuria SEBASTIAN-GALLES, Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu FabraAlejandrina CRISTIA, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France, Spain

Alejandrina CRISTIA, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et de Psycholinguistique, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, France

Abstract Since there are no systematic pauses delimiting words in speech, the problem of word segmentation is formidable even for monolingual infants. We use computational modeling to assess whether word segmentation is substantially harder in a bilingual than a monolingual setting. Seven algorithms representing different cognitive approaches to segmentation are applied to transcriptions of naturalistic input to young children, carefully processed to generate perfectly matched monolingual and bilingual corpora. We vary the overlap in phonology and lexicon experienced by modeling exposure to languages that are more similar (Catalan and Spanish) or more different (English and Spanish). We find that the greatest variation in performance is due to different segmentation algorithms and the second greatest to language, with bilingualism having effects that are smaller than both algorithm and language effects. Implications of these computational results for experimental and modeling approaches to language acquisition are discussed.

Key words word segmentation, infancy, computational modeling

Variation in quality of maternal input and development of coda stops in English-speaking children in Singapore

Jasper Hong SIM, University of Cambridge, UK

Brechtje POST, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract This study examines the effects of input quality on early phonological acquisition by investigating whether interadult variation in specific phonetic properties in the input is reflected in the production of their children. We analysed the English coda stop release patterns in the spontaneous speech of fourteen mothers and compared them with the spontaneous production of their preschool children. The analysis revealed a very strong positive input–production relationship; mothers who released coda stops to a lesser degree also had children who tended to not release their stops, and the same was true for mothers who released their stops to a higher degree. The findings suggest that young children are sensitive to acoustic properties that are subphonemic, and these properties are also reflected in their production, showing the importance of considering input quality when investigating child production.

Child-directed and overheard input from different speakers in two distinct cultures

Georgia LOUKATOU, LSCP, Département d'études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, 75005 Paris, France

Camila SCAFF, Human ecology group, Institute of evolutionary medicine (IEM), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Katherine DEMUTH, Macquairie University, Australia

Alejandrina CRISTIA, LSCP, Département d'études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University, 75005 Paris, France

Naomi HAVRON, University of Haifa, Israel

Abstract Despite the fact that in most communities interaction occurs between the child and multiple speakers, most previous research on input to children focused on input from mothers. We annotated recordings of Sesotho-learning toddlers living in non-industrial Lesotho in South Africa, and French-learning toddlers living in urban regions in France. We examined who produced the input (mothers, other children, adults), how much input was child directed, and whether and how it varied across speakers. As expected, mothers contributed most of the input in the French recordings. However, in the Sesotho recordings, input from other children was more common than input from mothers or other adults. Child-directed speech from all speakers in both cultural groups showed similar qualitative modifications. Our findings suggest that input from other children is prevalent and has similar features as child-directed from adults described in previous work, inviting cross-cultural research into the effects of input from other children.

Key words cross-cultural， linguistic input， child-directed speech， peer speech， quantitative and qualitative analysis， French language， Sesotho language， language development

Determinants of early lexical acquisition: Effects of word- and child-level factors on Dutch children's acquisition of words

Josje VERHAGEN, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Mees VAN STIPHOUT, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Elma BLOM, Department of Special Education: Cognitive and Motor Disabilities Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Abstract Previous research on the effects of word-level factors on lexical acquisition has shown that frequency and concreteness are most important. Here, we investigate CDI data from 1,030 Dutch children, collected with the short form of the Dutch CDI, to address (i) how word-level factors predict lexical acquisition, once child-level factors are controlled, (ii) whether effects of these word-level factors vary with word class and age, and (iii) whether any interactions with age are due to differences in receptive vocabulary. Mixed-effects regressions yielded effects of frequency and concreteness, but not of word class and phonological factors (e.g., word length, neighborhood density). The effect of frequency was stronger for nouns than predicates. The effects of frequency and concreteness decreased with age, and were not explained by differences in vocabulary knowledge. These findings extend earlier results to Dutch, and indicate that effects of age are not due to increases in vocabulary knowledge.

Key words lexical acquisition, Dutch, toddlers, word-level factors, subject-level factors

Young minds’ quest for regularity: Evidence from the Turkish causative

Mine NAKİPOĞLU, Department of Linguistics, Boğaziçi University, John Freely Hall 301, Bebek 34342, İstanbul, Turkey

Berna A. UZUNDAĞ, Department of Psychology, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey

Özge SARIGÜL, Department of Linguistics, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task, investigated the acquisition of the irregular distribution in the Turkish causative. Results showed that in early acquisition, to pin down the four causative suffixes, children engaged in comparisons between analogous exemplars. Thereafter to tackle the irregularity in two of the suffixes, children entertained competing hypotheses that yielded overregularizations and irregularizations. Overregularizations were instances of abstraction across the input based on type frequency; irregularizations were attempts to default to erroneous micro-generalizations. Negative correlation between errors and verb frequency suggested that recovery from errors was sensitive to token frequency. The overgeneralize-then-recover pattern that emerged in the acquisition of causative supported an integrated account of the roles of analogy, abstraction, and frequency in morphology learning.

Key words causative, abstraction, analogy, overregularization/irregularization errors, frequency

Consonant articulation and vocabulary size: Twins versus singletons

F. Nihan KETREZ, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey

Abstract 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.

Key words Consonant articulation, twins, Turkish, CDI, vocabulary size

¡Casi te caístes!: Variation in second person singular preterit forms in Spanish Children

Elisabeth BAKER, University of New Mexico

Abstract The current study investigates Spanish children's variation between the standard and non-standard forms for second person singular preterit –s (caiste ~ caístes). All second person singular preterit forms were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 78 children in Spain and analyzed for the effects of age, language contact setting, and lexical frequency. Results show that children in contact with Galician and Catalan produce more non-standard than children in non-contact areas like Madrid. Meanwhile, low-frequency verbs (e.g., pillaste) are more likely to occur with the non-standard –s than high-frequency verbs (e.g., fuiste). However, age is not a significant predictor of children's 2sg preterit production. These preliminary findings demonstrate that Spanish children do have the non-standard -s in their speech, and that their 2sg preterit forms are significantly conditioned by language contact and lexical frequency.

Key words morphosyntactic variation, acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, developmental sociolinguistics, acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax

Improvements of Statistical Learning Skills Allow Older Children to Go Beyond Single-Hypothesis Testing When Learning Words

Ming Yean SIA, The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia

Julien MAYOR, University of Oslo, Forskningsveien 3A, 0373 Oslo, Norway

Abstract 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.

Key words early word learning, associative process, language acquisition, cross-situational statistical learning, non-selectivity

The development of narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children aged 4 to 9: a longitudinal study

Josefin LINDGREN

Abstract This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4) and were at ceiling at T2 (5;10), whereas story structure developed significantly until T4 (9;4). Narrative length and syntactic complexity reached a plateau at T3 (7;4). Referent introduction was not mastered until T4. The results suggest that general conclusions regarding the development of narrative skills depend on the specific aspects studied.

Key words macrostructure, microstructure, Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), narratives, Swedish

Children's Understanding of Proper Names and Descriptions

Kristan A. MARCHAK, University of Alberta, Canada

D. Geoffrey HALL, University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract This research addressed the question of whether children understand proper names differently from descriptions. We examined how children extend these two types of expressions from an initial object (a truck) owned by the experimenter to two identical objects created by transforming the initial object, both owned by the experimenter. Adults and 5/6-year-olds extended a name (“Tommy”) to ONLY ONE post-transformation object, but extended a description (“my truck”) to both objects. Adults and 7-year-olds (but not 5/6-year-olds) also extended a description modeled as a name (“called My Truck”) to ONLY ONE object. Like adults, children understand that proper names identify unique individuals, but that descriptions identify properties.

Key words proper names, descriptions, individuals

期刊简介

A key publication in the field, Journal of Child Language publishes articles on all aspects of the scientific study of language behaviour in children, the principles which underlie it, and the theories which may account for it. The international range of authors and breadth of coverage allow the journal to forge links between many different areas of research including psychology, linguistics, cognitive science and anthropology. This interdisciplinary approach spans a wide range of interests: phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and any other recognised facet of language study. Aspects of reading development are considered when there is a clear language component. The journal normally publishes full-length empirical studies or General Articles as well as shorter Brief Research Reports. To be appropriate for this journal, articles should include some quantitative data analyses, and articles based on case studies need to have a convincing rationale for this design. The journal publishes thematic special issues on occasion, the topic and format of which are determined by the editorial team.

作为该领域的一个重要出版物，《儿童语言研究》发表了关于儿童语言行为科学研究的所有方面的文章，其基础原则，以及可能解释语言行为的理论。国际范围的作者和广泛的覆盖面使该杂志能够在许多不同的研究领域之间建立联系，包括心理学，语言学，认知科学和人类学。这种跨学科的方法跨越了广泛的兴趣：语音学，语音学、形态学、句法学、词汇学、语义学、语用学、社会语言学，以及任何其他公认的语言研究方面。当有一个明确的语言组成部分时，阅读发展的各个方面被考虑。该杂志通常出版完整长度的实证研究或一般文章以及较短的简要研究报告。为了适合这个杂志，文章应该包括一些定量的数据分析，基于案例研究的文章需要有一个令人信服的设计理由。本刊有时会出版专题特刊，其主题和版式由编辑团队决定。

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