Average differences in children's language abilities by socioeconomic status (SES) emerge early in development and predict academic achievement. Previous research has focused on coarse-grained outcome measures such as vocabulary size, but less is known about the extent to which SES differences exist in children's strategies for comprehension and learning. We measured children's (N = 98) comprehension of passive sentences to investigate whether SES differences are more pronounced in overall knowledge of the construction or in more specific abilities to process sentences during real-time interpretation. SES differences in comprehension emerged when syntactic revision of passives was necessary, and disappeared when the need to revise was removed. Further, syntactic revision but not knowledge of the passive best explained the association between SES and a standardized measure of syntactic development. These results demonstrate that SES differences in syntactic development may result from how children recruit syntactic information within sentences.

This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider et al., 2005). The proportion of appropriate referring expressions for introducing story characters clearly increases from age four to six. However, the children's performance is strongly stimulus-dependent. All age groups perform better on MAIN than on ENNI. One should thus be careful when drawing conclusions about the age at which children are able to use referring expressions appropriately.

Most computational models of word segmentation are trained and tested on transcripts of speech, rather than the speech itself, and assume that speech is converted into a sequence of symbols prior to word segmentation. We present a way of representing speech corpora that avoids this assumption, and preserves acoustic variation present in speech. We use this new representation to re-evaluate a key computational model of word segmentation. One finding is that high levels of phonetic variability degrade the model's performance. While robustness to phonetic variability may be intrinsically valuable, this finding needs to be complemented by parallel studies of the actual abilities of children to segment phonetically variable speech.

This study explores the hypothesis that the existence of a short sensitive period for lower-level speech perception/articulation skills, and a long one for higher-level language skills, may partly explain the language outcomes of children with cochlear implants (CIs). The participants were fourteen children fitted with a CI before their second birthday. Data about their language skills and the environmental conditions (e.g. Family Involvement in rehabilitation) were obtained over a period of three years. Age at implantation correlated exclusively with the ratio of errors of place of articulation, a phonological feature for which CIs provide insufficient information. The degree of Family Involvement was significantly correlated with the remaining language measures. We conclude that small plasticity reductions affecting lower-level skills may partly explain the difficulties of some CI users in developing language.

Peters has made an excellent case for the importance of ‘filler’ syllables during the early stages of children's language development. In this commentary, I discuss some of the implications of filler-syllable use for related areas of child language research. The comments are based on observations made during collaborative cross-linguistic studies of both normally developing children and children with language disorders acquiring Italian (Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, McGregor & Sabbadini, 1992; Bortolini & Leonard, 1996; Bortolini, Caselli & Leonard, 1997; Leonard & Bortolini, 1998), Hebrew (Dromi, Leonard & Shteiman, 1993; Leonard & Dromi, 1994; Dromi, Leonard, Adam & Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, 1999; Leonard, Dromi, Adam & Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, 2000), and Swedish (Hansson, Nettelbladt & Leonard, 2000).

While recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2·5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational evidence were more ambiguous. Children saw four trials in which a novel word occurred with four novel objects; only one object consistently co-occurred with the word across trials. The frequency of distracter objects varied across conditions. When all distracter referents occurred only once (no-competition), children successfully identified the noun's referent. When a high-probability competitor referent occurred on three trials, children identified the target referent if the competitor was absent on the third trial (short-competition) but not if it was present until the fourth trial (long-competition). This suggests that although 2·5-year-olds’ cross-situational learning scales up to more ambiguous scenes, it is disrupted by high-probability competitor referents.

We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent-initial sentences were easier to comprehend than patient-initial sentences, but the effect of word order was modulated by voice. Moreover, our eye-tracking data provided evidence that, by the first noun phrase, seven-year-old children looked more to the target in the agent-initial compared to the patient-initial conditions, but this word order advantage was no longer observed by the second noun phrase. The findings support language processing and acquisition models which emphasize the role of frequency in developing heuristic strategies (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006).

Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn gender agreement better when encouraged to learn from multiword units. Previous work has not examined two core predictions of this proposal: (1) that children also benefit from initial exposure to multiword units, and (2) that their learning patterns reflect a greater reliance on multiword units compared to adults. We test both predictions using an artificial-language. As predicted, both children and adults benefit from early exposure to multiword units. In addition, when exposed to unsegmented input – adults show better learning of nouns compared to article-noun pairings, but children do not, a pattern consistent with adults’ predicted tendency to focus less on multiword units.

Do parents fine-tune the MLU of utterances with a particular word as the word is on the verge of appearing in the child's production? We analyzed a corpus of spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads. The children were in the initial stages of their lexical development, and the parents’ utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired were selected. The main finding is that the MLU of the parental utterances containing the target words gradually decreased up to the point of the children's first production of those words. This suggests that parents fine-tune their utterances to support the children's linguistic development.

Twenty-two normally developing five-year-olds were asked to judge, identify, repair and explain phonological and morphological errors. All of the errors involved the addition, substitution or omission of a single phoneme, which in the morphological task, was also an inflectional morpheme. Stimuli were controlled for type of error (omission, addition, substitution), location of the error (word final) and word status of the resulting error (word, non-word). Children performed significantly better on the phonological task than on the morphological task. It is proposed that the results are due to differences in the type and location of linguistic information to be analysed and to differences in memory demands in the tasks.

Mothers' verbal responses to their infants' spontaneous imitations of familiar and non-familiar words during naturally occurring interactions were examined in a longitudinal sample observed at 1 ; 1, 1 ; 5 and 1 ; 9. Maternal responses to both familiar and non-familiar imitations exhibited structural characteristics likely to be facilitative of early word learning, including shorter and single-word utterances and reproductions of imitated words in sentence-final position. Mothers also responded differentially to infants' non-familiar versus familiar imitations. Mothers produced more return imitations and more exact repetitions, providing an extra exemplar, following infants' imitations of non-familiar words. The familiar words infants imitated were more likely to receive the more complex expanded and reduced+expanded return imitations. Results suggest mothers' responses to infants' verbal imitations could serve as a mechanism for facilitating language acquisition.

This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task). Results suggest that Hungarian nominal and verbal suffixes can be used productively before the age of three. Children showed greater productivity with nominal than with verbal suffixes, and no productivity with novel suffixes; greater input variability facilitated productive use. These findings confirm that although morphological productivity is an early achievement, it is a gradual process influenced by several characteristics (e.g. syntactic category and variability) of the input. They also confirm that the new method is an effective way of testing morphological knowledge even at younger ages where other ways of eliciting grammatical knowledge often fail.

The ability to make inferences is essential for effective language comprehension. While inferencing training benefits reading comprehension in school-aged children (see Elleman, 2017, for a review), we do not yet know whether it is beneficial to support the development of these skills prior to school entry. In a pre-registered randomised controlled trial, we evaluated the efficacy of a parent-delivered intervention intended to promote four-year-olds’ oral inferencing skills during shared book-reading. One hundred children from socioeconomically diverse backgrounds were randomly assigned to inferencing training or an active control condition of daily maths activities. The training was found to have no effect on inferencing. However, inferencing measures were highly correlated with children's baseline language ability. This suggests that a more effective approach to scaffolding inferencing in the preschool years might be to focus on promoting vocabulary to develop richer and stronger semantic networks.

Six children were studied from the age of 0;6 to 1;6 in order to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational data. Comprehension of words was divided into four categories – object names, context-bound object words, action words and personal names. The relative frequency of the different categories of word was found to change with the size of the comprehension vocabulary as personal names decreased in importance and both object names and action words became increasingly more common. There was considerable variation among the six children especially in the proportion of object names and action words that they understood but vocabulary composition became highly stable between 60 and 100 words.

This longitudinal study examines change in maternal interaction strategies in Taiwanese mothers across time, and the synchronic and diachronic relationships between maternal interaction strategies and children's language and early literacy skills. Forty-two mother–child dyads participated in this study. Their interactions during joint book-reading were tape-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed when the children were fourteen, twenty-six, and thirty-six months of age. The children received a battery of language and early literacy tests when they were thirty-six months old. Findings showed that Taiwanese mothers adjusted their use of interaction strategies as their children grew. Maternal use of description, performance, prediction inference, and print-related talk were positively correlated with their children's language and literacy skills. Significant negative correlations were found between use of task-behavioral regulation strategy and text reading in mothers and their children's language performance. This study suggests that age-appropriate interaction strategies are important for children's language and early literacy development.

Maternal estensive naming was investigated in a cross-sectional study of 12 children aged 0;10, 1;3 and 1;6, and a follow-up study of four children aged 1;3. Display, demonstration and pointing were coded with regard to whether and how co-occurring speech referred to gesture focus. Multivariate log-linear frequency analyses found that mothers' coordination of speech with gesture varied with age and the gesture used. Maternal naming of objects was most frequent with children aged 0; 10. Maternal gesture-speech coordination with children aged 1;3 and 1;6 differed in two related ways: (1) actions were named more frequently than objects; and (2) mothers often combined gesture with complementary speech referring, not to gesture focus, but to an action to be performed with the object indicated. At all ages, pointing was rarely used to name ostensively, and occurred most often in combination with complementary reference. Maternal input was found to be significantly correlated with children's reported receptive vocabulary.

This paper presents a model of syntax acquisition, whose main points are as follows: Syntax is acquired in an item-based manner; early learning facilitates subsequent learning – as evidenced by the accelerating rate of new verbs entering a given structure; and mastery of syntactic knowledge is typically achieved through practice – as evidenced by intensive use and common word order errors – and this slows down learning during the early stages of acquiring a structure.

The facilitation and practice hypotheses were tested on naturalistic production samples of six Hebrew-acquiring children ranging from ages 1;1 to 2;7 (average ages 1;6 to 2;4 months). Results show that most structures did in fact accelerate; the notion of ‘practice’ is supported by the inverse correlation found between number of verbs and number of errors in the earliest productions in a given structure; and the absence of acceleration in a minority of the structures is due to the fact that they involve relatively less practice.

In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting conjoined agent intransitives. The same children, however, do not appear to rely exclusively on the number of nouns as a cue to structure meaning. The pattern of results indicates that children are processing a number of cues when inferring the meaning of the conjoined agent intransitive. These cues appear to be in competition with each other and the cue that receives the most activation is used to infer the meaning of the construction. Critically, these studies suggest that children's knowledge of syntactic structures forms a network of organization, such that knowledge of one structure can impact on interpretation of other structures.

Children's production of case-marked pronouns in Hebrew was studied with respect to possessive marking, direct-object marking, and ‘on’- locative marking. In each of these three instances the preposition appears in a bound form with a suffixal pronominal. One hundred and five children between 2;0 and 5:5 were tested in a game-like procedure designed to elicit each of the three prepositions with 1st, 2nd and 3rd personal pronouns. Results indicate that general cross-linguistic principles are operating in the acquisition process, while language specific morphophonological complexity affects relative order of acquisition. A developmental sequence may be seen in the five response patterns identified.