The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4–9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children’s morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.

Learning new words and, subsequently, a lexicon, is a time-extended process requiring encoding of word-referent pairs, retention of that information, and generalization to other exemplars of the category. Some children, however, fail in one or more of these processes resulting in language delays. The present study examines the abilities of children who vary in vocabulary size (including both children with normal language (NL) and late talking (LT) children) across multiple timescales/processes – known and novel word mapping, novel word retention, and novel noun generalization. Results indicate that children with lower language skills suffer from deficits in quick in-the-moment mapping of known words compared to their NL peers, but age and vocabulary size rather than normative vocabulary ranking or NL/LT status better predicts performance on retention and generalization processes. Implications for understanding language development as a holistic process with multiple interacting variables are discussed.

Instances of person-reference, in the form of personal pronouns, names, or terms of endearment, are frequently used in child-directed speech. Examining this aspect of parental input is especially relevant to children with autism, who experience difficulties with person-reference. In this study, we compared the person-reference during parent-child interactions of Bulgarian (N=37) and English-speaking (N=37) parents of children with autism, who were matched on the language ability of their child. English-speaking parents used significantly more personal pronouns to refer to their children, while Bulgarian-speaking parents used the child’s name more along with kinship terms. Furthermore, Bulgarian-speaking parents used significantly more different ways to refer to their child. These group differences were interpreted in the context of structural differences in the pronominal systems of Bulgarian and English, and in terms of culturally different discourse practices.

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

We investigate Korean-speaking children’s knowledge about clause-level constructions involving a transitive event – active transitive and suffixal passive – through corpus analysis and Bayesian modelling. The analysis of Korean caregiver input and children’s production in CHILDES revealed that the rates of constructional patterns produced by the children mirrored those uttered by the caregivers to a considerable degree and that the caregivers’ use of case-marking was skewed towards single form-function pairings (despite the multiple form-function associations that the markers manifest). Based on these characteristics, we modelled a Bayesian learner by employing construction-based input (without considering lexical information). This simulation revealed the dominance of several constructional patterns, occupying most of the input, and their inhibitory effects on the development of the other patterns. Our findings illuminate how children shape clause-level constructional knowledge in Korean, an understudied language for this topic, as a function of input properties and domain-general learning capacities, appealing to the usage-based constructionist approach.

This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use Mandarin Chinese, a language lacking tense markers, to represent characters’ speech in their story narratives. Eighty participants, from three to six years of age, completed an elicited narrative task based on a wordless picture book. The representing forms and signals that they employed in representing activities were assessed. The results showed a significant age-related increase in the overall use of speech representation by the cohort of children. Regarding representing forms, direct representation exhibited its expected dominance among all age groups, and its presence in children’s narratives grew significantly with age. Concerning representing signals, shuō ‘say’ was the most prevalent across all ages and susceptible to significant age effects, and, with advancing age, children’s representing signals expanded from single verbs to more complex syntactic constructions. In addition, no significant gender effects were observed regarding the representing forms or signals that Mandarin-speaking children used.

In an increasingly diverse society, young children are likely to speak different first languages that are not the majority language of society. Preschool might be one of the first and few environments where they experience the majority language. The present study investigated how preschool teachers communicate with monolingual English preschoolers and preschoolers learning English as an additional language (EAL). We recorded and transcribed four hours of naturalistic preschool classroom activities and observed whether and how preschool teachers tailored their speech to children of different language proficiency levels and linguistic backgrounds (monolingual English: n = 13; EAL: n = 10), using a suite of tools for analysing quantity and quality of speech. We found that teachers used more diverse vocabulary and more complex syntax with the monolingual children and children who were more proficient in English, showing sensitivity to individual children’s language capabilities and adapting their language use accordingly.

We examined the influence of the lexical and grammatical aspect of events on pronoun resolution in adults (18 to 23 years, N = 46), adolescents (13 to 14 years, N=66) and children (7 to 11 years, N=192). Participants were presented with 64 two-sentence stimuli: the first sentence described events with two same gender protagonists; the second began with a personal pronoun and described a status that could be attributed to either protagonist. Participants recorded to whom the pronoun referred, in a booklet. For all groups, Subject resolutions were more likely for events (a) without endpoints relative to those with endpoints, and (b) described as ongoing rather than completed, but this latter influence was restricted to events with endpoints for adults and adolescents. The findings provide support for the Event Structure Hypothesis of pronoun resolution (Rohde, Kehler & Elman, 2006) and provide new insights into the development of pronoun resolution.

This study investigated the longitudinal relationship between children’s domain-general cognitive constraints underlying phonological and sentence processing development in a big sample of typically developing children. 104 children were tested on non-linguistic processing speed, phonological skills (phonological short term memory, phonological knowledge, phonological working memory), and sentence processing abilities (sentence repetition and receptive grammar) in 1st grade (aged 6 to 6.5) and one year later. A cross-lagged structural equation model showed that non-linguistic processing speed was a concurrent predictor of phonological skills, and that phonology had a powerful effect on the child’s sentence processing abilities concurrently and longitudinally, providing clear evidence for the role of domain-general processes in the developmental pathway of language. These findings support a cascaded cognitive view of language development and pose important challenges for evaluation and intervention strategies in childhood.

Inflectional morphology provides a unique platform for a discussion of whether morphological productivity is rule-based or analogy-based. The present study testing 140 children (range = 29 to 97 months; M(SD) = 64.1(18.8)) on an elicited production task investigated the acquisition of the irregular distribution in the Turkish aorist. Results suggested that to discover the allomorphs of the Turkish aorist, children initially carried out similarity comparisons between analogous exemplars, which helped them tap into phonological features to induce generalizations for regulars and irregulars. Thereafter to tackle the irregularity, children entertained competing hypotheses yielding overregularizations and irregularizations. While the trajectory of overregularizations implicated the gradual formulation of an abstraction based on type-frequency, irregularizations suggested both intrusion of analogous exemplars and children’s attempts to default to an erroneous micro-generalization. Our findings supported a model of morphological learning that is driven by analogy at the outset and that invokes rule-induction in later stages.

Private speech is a cognitive tool to guide thinking and behavior, yet its regulatory use in atypical development remains equivocal. This study investigated the influence of task difficulty on private speech in preschool children with attention or language difficulties. Measures of private speech use, form and content were obtained while 52 typically developing and 25 developmentally at-risk three- to four-year-old children completed Duplo construction and card sort tasks, each comprising two levels of challenge. In line with previous research, developmentally at-risk children used less internalized private speech than typically developing peers. However, both typically developing and at-risk children demonstrated a similar regulatory private speech response to difficulty with no systematic evidence of group difference. This was captured by an increase in all utterances, reduced private speech internalization, and more frequent forethought and self-reflective content. Results support the hypothesis of delayed private speech internalization but not regulatory deviance in atypical development.