Before the beginning of the Journal of Child Language in 1974 three technological innovations had set the stage for a fundamental expansion and revision of our understanding of the processes of child language acquisition. Portable audio and video recorders changed both the quantity and quality of data. Computers made it possible to store and search large corpora, to rapidly carry out statistical analyses of the distribution of linguistic forms and their changes over time, and to simulate models of acquisition. This essay is a personal and historical overview of the unexpected consequences of those technological innovations for the study of child language. In looking to the future, another tool, linguistic typology, is essential for building models of language acquisition.

This study tested the predictions of the procedural deficit hypothesis by investigating the relationship between sequential statistical learning and two aspects of lexical ability, lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic, in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants included forty children (ages 8;5–12;3), twenty children with SLI and twenty with typical development. Children completed Saffran's statistical word segmentation task, a lexical-phonological access task (gating task), and a word definition task. Poor statistical learners were also poor at managing lexical-phonological competition during the gating task. However, statistical learning was not a significant predictor of semantic richness in word definitions. The ability to track statistical sequential regularities may be important for learning the inherently sequential structure of lexical-phonological, but not as important for learning lexical-semantic knowledge. Consistent with the procedural/declarative memory distinction, the brain networks associated with the two types of lexical learning are likely to have different learning properties.

It has been proposed that cochlear implant users may develop robust categorical perception skills, but that they show limited precision in perception. This article explores if a parallel contrast is observable in production, and if, despite acquiring typical linguistic representations, their early words are inconsistent. The participants were eight Spanish-learning deaf children implanted before their second birthday. Two studies examined the transition from babbling to words, and the one-word period. Study 1 found that the participants used the same sound types in babbling and in words, indicating that production is guided by stored motor patterns. No clear evidence of inconsistent production was observed. Study 2 found that in the one-word period CI users develop typical prosodic representations, but that their productions are highly unstable. Results are discussed in terms of the role of auditory feedback for the development of productive language skills.

This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced by TD children. Eighteen children with SLI, eighteen TD age-matched (AM) and nine TD language-matched (LM) Danish-speaking children participated in a comprehension and in a production task. All children performed better on the comprehension compared with the production task, as well as on SRCs compared to ORCs and produced various avoidance strategies. In the ORC context, children with SLI produced more reversal errors than the AM children, who opted for passive ORCs. These results are discussed within current theories of SLI and indicate a deficiency with the assignment of thematic roles rather than with the structural make-up of RCs.

Perusing early issues of this Journal from nearly forty years ago, we find many topics on the contents lists that could appear in a current issue. But the resources available to contributors for addressing questions of interest have changed dramatically, not least in the public availability of data. Here we look briefly at two assets which have accrued to the field in the intervening decades, and at the contributions they make. CHILDES provides a level playing field on which debates about the import of language sample data, especially longitudinal data, can be played out. The MBCDI and its offspring encourage the collection of data from large samples of individuals and so promote the exploration of factors that may explain individual differences. Both have been major contributions to the field.

Japanese infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) were compared on their segmental distributions and consonant-vowel association patterns. Consistent with findings in other languages, a higher ratio of segments that are generally produced early was found in IDS compared to ADS: more labial consonants and low-central vowels, but fewer fricatives. Consonant-vowel associations also favored the early produced labial-central, coronal-front, coronal-central, and dorsal-back patterns. On the other hand, clear language-specific patterns included a higher frequency of dorsals, affricates, geminates, and moraic nasals in IDS. These segments are frequent in adult Japanese, but not in the early productions or the IDS of other studied languages. In combination with previous results, the current study suggests that both fine-tuning (an increased use of early produced segments) and highlighting (an increased use of language-specifically relevant segments) might modify IDS on the segmental level.

A speaker's regional dialect is a rich source of information about that person. Two studies examined five- to six-year-old children's perception of regional dialect: Can they perceive differences among dialects? Have they made meaningful social connections to specific dialects? Experiment 1 asked children to categorize speakers into groups based on their accent; Experiment 2 asked them to match speakers to (un)familiar cultural items. Each child was tested with two of the following: the child's Home dialect, a Regional variant of that dialect, and a Second-Language variant. Results showed that children could successfully categorize only with a Home vs. Second-Language dialect contrast, but could reliably link cultural items with either a Home vs. Second-Language or a Regional vs. Second-Language dialect contrast. These results demonstrate five- to six-year-old children's developing perceptual skill with dialect, and suggest that they have a gradient representation of dialect variation.

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.

Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this ambiguity by using an interactive word-learning study similar to that used in French, with British-English-learning toddlers aged 1;4 and 1;11. Children were taught two CVC labels differing on either a consonant or vowel and tested on their pairing of a third object named with one of the previously taught labels, or part of them. In concert with previous research on British-English toddlers, our results provided no evidence of a general consonant bias. The language-specific mechanisms explaining the differential status for consonants and vowels in lexical development are discussed.

Regular and irregular inflection in children's production has been examined in many previous studies. Yet, little is known about the processes involved in children's recognition of inflected words. To gain insight into how children process inflected words, the current study examines regular -t and irregular -n participles of German using the cross-modal priming technique testing 108 monolingual German-speaking children in two age groups (group I, mean age: 8;4, group II, mean age: 9;9) and a control group of 72 adults. Although both age groups of children had the same full priming effect as adults for -t forms, only children of age group II showed an adult-like (partial) priming effect for -n participles. We argue that children (within the age range tested) employ the same mechanisms for regular inflection as adults but that the lexical retrieval processes required for irregular forms become more efficient when children get older.

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same language have partly different segmentation abilities, and whether segmenting a non-native dialect has a cost. Infants were tested on standard European or Canadian French stimuli, in the word–passage or passage–word order. Our study first establishes an early onset of segmentation abilities: Parisian infants segment bisyllabic words at age 0;8 in the passage–word order only (revealing a robust order of presentation effect). Second, it shows that there are differences in segmentation abilities across Parisian and Canadian French infants, and that there is a cost for cross-dialect segmentation for Parisian infants. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding word segmentation processes.

Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the effect of accent on referential resolution in six- to eleven-year-old children and adults. In all age groups, a prominent accent facilitated the detection of a target in contrastive discourse sequences (pink cat→green cat), whereas it led to a garden path in non-contrastive sequences (pink rabbit→green monkey: the initial fixations were on rabbits). While the data indicate that children as young as age six immediately interpret contrastive accent, even the oldest child group showed delayed fixations compared to adults. We argue that the children's slower recovery from the garden path reflects the gradual development in cognitive flexibility that matures independently of general oculomotor control.

Little research has explored how preschools can support children's second-language (L2) vocabulary development. This study keenly followed the progress of twemty-six Turkish immigrant children growing up in Norway from preschool (age five) to fifth grade (age ten). Four different measures of preschool talk exposure (amount and diversity of teacher-led group talk and amount and diversity of peer talk), as well as the demographic variables of maternal education and co-ethnic concentration in the neighborhood, were employed to predict the children's L2 vocabulary trajectories. The results of growth analyses revealed that maternal education was the only variable predicting children's vocabulary growth during the elementary years. However, teacher-led talk, peer talk, and neighborhood predicted children's L2 vocabulary skills at age five, and these differences were maintained up to age ten. This study underscores the importance of both preschool talk exposure (teacher-led talk and peer talk) and demographic factors on L2 learners' vocabulary development.

Major large-scale research projects in the early years of developmental psycholinguistics were English-based, yet even then numerous studies were available or under way in a range of different languages (Ferguson & Slobin, 1973). Since then, the field of cross-linguistic child language research has burgeoned in several directions. First, rich information is now available on the acquisition of dozens of languages from around the world in numerous language families, spearheaded by the five-volume series edited by Slobin (1985–1997) and complemented by in-depth examination of specific constructions – e.g. causative alternation, motion verbs, passive voice, subject elision, noun compounding – in various languages, culminating in an in-depth examination of the acquisition of ergativity in over a dozen languages (Bavin & Stoll, 2013). A second fruitful direction is the application of carefully comparable designs targeting a range of issues among children acquiring different languages, including: production of early lexico-grammatical constructions (Slobin, 1982), sentence processing comprehension (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), expression of spatial relations (Bowerman, 2011), discourse construction of oral narratives based on short picture series (Hickmann, 2003) and longer storybooks (Berman & Slobin, 1994), and extended texts in different genres (Berman, 2008). Taken together, research motivated by the question of what is particular and what universal in child language highlights the marked, and early, impact of ambient language typology on processes of language acquisition. The challenge remains to operationalize such insights by means of psychologically sound and linguistically well-motivated measures for evaluating the interplay between the variables of developmental level, linguistic domain, and ambient language typology.

In the present study we investigate the production of gesture, intonation, and eye-gaze within the proto-imperative behaviour of one English child aged 1;0 to 1;7. The study is based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the three behaviours. The results indicate a shift from reaching gestures to points, and from rising terminal pitch contours to non-rising contours. The analysis also highlights changes in eye-gaze to the co-participant over time. In addition we identify a significant relationship between pitch contour and gesture type within the sample, with points being more closely associated with non-rise intonation than reaching gestures. We suggest that the changes in proto-imperative behaviour signal a shift in the underlying representation of the function from a request for help to a demand for a particular object, and that this development paves the way for the subsequent conventional linguistic expression of the imperative function.

This article demonstrates how the Comparative Method can be applied to cross-linguistic research on language acquisition. The Comparative Method provides a systematic procedure for organizing and interpreting acquisition data from different languages. The Comparative Method controls for cross-linguistic differences at all levels of the grammar and is especially useful in drawing attention to variation in contexts of use across languages. This article uses the Comparative Method to analyze the acquisition of verb suffixes in two Mayan languages: K'iche' and Yucatec. Mayan status suffixes simultaneously mark distinctions in verb transitivity, verb class, mood, and clause position. Two-year-old children acquiring K'iche' and Yucatec Maya accurately produce the status suffixes on verbs, in marked distinction to the verbal prefixes for aspect and agreement. We find evidence that the contexts of use for the suffixes differentially promote the children's production of cognate status suffixes in K'iche' and Yucatec.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are distinguishable from typically developing children primarily in the pace and course of their language development. For this reason, they are appropriate candidates for inclusion in any theory of language acquisition. In this paper, the areas of overlap between children with SLI and those developing in typical fashion are discussed, along with how the joint study of these two populations can enhance our understanding of the language development process. In particular, evidence from children with SLI can provide important information concerning the role of language typology in language development, the optimal ages for acquiring particular linguistic details, the robustness of the bilingual advantage for children, the role of input in children's acquisition of grammatical details, the unintended influence of processing demands during language assessment, the contributions of treatment designs to the study of typically developing children, and the study of individual differences in language development.

The present study investigated Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the polarity sensitive item renhe ‘any’ in Mandarin Chinese. Like its English counterpart any, renhe can be used as a negative polarity item (NPI), or as a free choice (FC) item, and both the distribution and interpretation of renhe are governed by the same syntactic and semantic constraints as English any. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, the present study tested five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of FC renhe in sentences containing the modal word neng ‘can’, and tested children's comprehension of NPI renhe in sentences containing the temporal conjunction zai…zhiqian ‘before’. Most children demonstrated knowledge of the interpretation of both FC renhe and NPI renhe despite a paucity of relevant adult input. Like adults, however, Mandarin-speaking children do not use renhe frequently in ordinary conversation, due to the availability of alternative colloquial expressions (wh-pronouns) that also convey children's intended meanings.

Two studies investigated syntactic productivity in three-year-old Mandarin speakers' use of verbs in the SVO and SbaOV constructions. In Study 1, children were taught novel verbs in one construction and assessed for their production in the other construction. Children produced verbs taught in the ba constructions in SVO utterances, but showed order effects when producing verbs taught in SVO constructions in ba utterances. In Study 2, children described animated scenes either with structural priming (i.e., after hearing verbs in SVO or ba constructions). Children demonstrated structural priming, producing more SVO and ba utterances, respectively, directly after hearing verbs in these constructions. These results indicate that Mandarin speaking three-year-olds demonstrate productive knowledge of both SVO and SbaOV constructions. Their ability to override the predominant input frequency of SVO runs counter to a purely usage-based account of early acquisition of grammar.

According to the Extended Statistical Learning account (ExSL; Stokes, Kern & dos Santos, 2012) late talkers (LTs) continue to use neighborhood density (ND) as a cue for word learning when their peers no longer use a density learning mechanism. In the current article, LTs expressive (active) lexicon ND values differed from those of their age-matched, but not language-matched, TD peers, a finding that provided support for the ExSL account. Stokes (2010) claimed that LTs had difficulty abstracting sparse words, but not dense, from the ambient language. If true, then LTs' receptive (passive), as well as active lexicons should be comprised of words of high ND. However, in the current research only active lexicons were of high ND. LTs' expressive lexicons may be small not because of an abstraction deficit, but because they are unable to develop sufficiently strong phonological representations to support word production.