Children learning English as an additional language (EAL) are a diverse and growing group of pupils in England’s schools. Relative to their monolingual (ML) peers, these children tend to show lower receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge in English, although interpretation of findings is limited by small and heterogeneous samples. In an effort to increase representativeness and power, the present study combined published and unpublished datasets from six cross-sectional and four longitudinal studies investigating the vocabulary development of 434 EAL learners and 342 ML peers (age range: 4;9–11;5) in 42 primary schools. Multilevel modelling confirmed previous findings of significantly lower English vocabulary scores of EAL learners and some degree of convergence in receptive but not expressive knowledge by the end of primary school. Evidence for narrowing of the gap in receptive knowledge was found only in datasets spanning a longer developmental period, hinting at the protracted nature of this convergence.

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting grammatically correct and incorrect word order constructions than gender constructions, regardless of language group. In fact, bilingualism per se did not impact the results as much as receptive vocabulary range. For example, children with the highest receptive vocabulary scores were more accurate in detecting incorrect word order constructions (i.e., word order violations, semantic anomalies) and incorrect gender agreement than children in the lower receptive vocabulary ranges. However, no differences were found between the ranges for ambiguous gender constructions. These results highlight the importance of receptive vocabulary ability on syntactic awareness performance, regardless of language group.

Verb-marking errors are a characteristic feature of the speech of typically-developing (TD) children and are particularly prevalent in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, both the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and the pattern of verb-marking deficit in DLD vary across languages and interact with the semantic and syntactic properties of the language being learned. In this paper, we review work using a computational model called MOSAIC. We show how this work allows us to understand several features of the cross-linguistic data that are otherwise difficult to explain. We also show how discrepancies between the developmental data and the quantitative predictions generated by MOSAIC can be used to identify weaknesses in our current understanding and lead to further theory development; and how the resulting model (MOSAIC+) helps us understand differences in the cross-linguistic patterning of verb-marking errors in TD children and children with DLD.

The interrelation of semantic and communicative factors was considered in three children's single-word responses to adult questions. Parents asked more yes/no than naming questions. Children were able to use yes and no appropriately, but did not always do so. The children seemed to have related the form of yes/no questions to the use of yes/no answers, but communicatively were not always willing or able to produce yes/no answers when required. Naming questions were more often followed by appropriate than by inappropriate utterances. The relation of these findings to the importance of naming in early language acquisition, and to the findings of Horgan (1977) and Steffensen (1977) was considered.

Previous developmental studies of conjunction have focused on the syntax of phrasal and sentential coordination (Lust, 1977; de Villiers, Tager-Flusberg & Hakuta, 1977; Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980, among others). The present study examined the flexibility of children's interpretation of conjunction. Specifically, when two predicates that can apply simultaneously to a single individual are conjoined in the scope of a plural definite (The bears are big and white), conjunction receives a Boolean, intersective interpretation. However, when the conjoined predicates cannot apply simultaneously to an individual (The bears are big and small), conjunction receives a weaker ‘split’ interpretation (Krifka, 1990; Lasersohn, 1995; Winter, 1996). Our experiments reveal that preschool-aged children are sensitive to both intersective and split interpretations, and can use their lexical and world knowledge of the relevant predicates in order to select an appropriate reading.

Commenting on R&T's ‘Developing Linguistic Literacy’ is not an easy task. Their attempt addresses precisely the right questions, in all their complexities and breadth, centring and bundling these questions in strategic and potentially novel ways, and thereby exploring new territories and encouraging investigators to enter these territories. However, I still feel left with a sense of incompleteness and exclusion when it comes to a more discursive orientation to theorizing literacy and development.

Eight children aged 4;1–8;1 and their primary caregivers participated in a study designed to evaluate their use of the onset cluster /str-/ in both read and conversational speech. The cluster is currently undergoing a reported sound change in many varieties of English, with the initial /s/ being retracted to [ʃ]. The study compared the initial fricative of the cluster in both the children and their mothers. Acoustic analysis was carried out in order to categorize tokens as either [s] or [ʃ] using spectral peak analysis. Results found that children as young as 5;1 were starting to exhibit the usage patterns of their mothers. The distribution of the novel variant suggests that the children may be learning this form via a process of lexical diffusion rather than by rule. Implications for the study of dialect acquisition and phonological acquisition in general are discussed.

Two-year-old children often start asking questions with where. In this study we test whether children understand where to mean route or absolute location and whether the size of the space or elevation made a difference. Previous research has documented developmental changes over the preschool years in children's non-verbal spatial reasoning. Forty-eight children between two and five years of age were interviewed. We asked them to point in response to where questions about an object, rooms on the same floor and on a different floor. All children pointed to the location of the hidden objects. The youngest children pointed to the route to rooms while the oldest children were more likely to point to the location of rooms. With age, the children gradually used more spatial location terms than deictic terms in response to where. These results suggest that children's meaning of where initially differs for different sized spaces and developmental changes reflect non-verbal cognition.

APPARENT CONTRADICTIONS, e.g. Did Susan like her supper? – Yes and no, involve asserting and denying the same proposition. They therefore violate the classical LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION, suggesting the use of non-classical INTERPRETIVE STRUCTURES in natural language and reasoning. Experiment 1 explores the range of such interpretive structures available to adults (n = 24) in their reasoning about an apparent contradiction. Experiment 2 uses a similar task to study the emergence of these interpretive structures in young children's reasoning (3;6 to 8;4, n = 48). Results suggest an early facility with resolution strategies relating to OBJECT STRUCTURE (as in, Maybe Susan liked one part of supper but didn't like another part) and an initial tendency to focus on the negative by referring to it first (as in, Maybe Susan didn't like one part of supper but did like another part). We discuss the results in terms of the NATURAL LOGIC of objects and their properties, and the LOGICAL RESOURCES available to young children.

This study investigated the claim that very young children avoid backwards coreference in their interpretation of sentences containing pronouns. Eighty-one children ranging in age from 3;1 to 8;0 and eight adults acted out four types of pronominal sentences. Cross-sectional data and individual response patterns reveal that children initially, prefer internal coreference even when such a response is disallowed for structural reasons. Avoidance of backwards coreference appears to be a late developing phenomenon characteristic of six-year-olds. Adult response patterns, which are manifested by some very young children, emerge as the dominant pattern by age seven.

This paper investigates English-speaking children's acquisition of raising constructions (e.g. John seems to Mary to be happy) and finds an asymmetric effect of NP type on their comprehension: an improvement in performance is observed when a lexical NP is raised across a pronominal experiencer (e.g. John seems to her to be happy) compared to when a pronoun is raised across a lexical NP experiencer (e.g. He seems to Mary to be happy). These results are consistent with a processing-based approach to intervention effects, which reduces children's difficulty with raising to a performance limitation, rather than a grammatical deficit.

Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper draws a comprehensive picture of the fact that literacy is a lengthy developing process involving many linguistic factors which sometimes begins even before school age and lasts until adulthood. I very much appreciated the breadth and thoroughness of Ravid & Tolchinsky's paper and, in particular, the fact that they have taken the relationship between oral language and literacy into account. It seems to me that this is rarely the case in current linguistic theories and I would like to offer a few comments on some of the consequences that a serious approach to literacy development would have on the studies of both oral language and literacy, and on linguistic theories themselves as well.

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of 1;11 and 6;7, in correspondence with their caregivers’ speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, 2009). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Persian causatives supports a usage-based account of verb-by-verb learning in child language development.