This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children's narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual…

To learn a verb, children must attend to objects and relations, often within a dynamic scene. Several studies show that comparing varied events linked to a verb helps children learn verbs, but there is also controversy in this area. This study asks whether children benefit from seeing variation across events as they learn a new verb, and uses an…

Previous research found a beneficial effect of augmentative signs (signs from a sign language used alongside speech) on spoken word learning by signing deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. The present study compared oral DHH children, and hearing children in a condition with babble noise in order to investigate whether prolonged experience…

In controlled contexts, young children find it more difficult to learn novel words for actions than words for objects: Imai et al. found that English-speaking three-year-olds mistakenly choose a novel object as a referent for a novel verb about 42% of the time despite hearing the verb in a transitive sentence. The current two studies investigated…

During the first years of language development, toddlers coordinate multiple cues in order to acquire the plural form. The aim of this study was to manipulate object similarity as well as set size in order to determine whether these variables impact children's comprehension of plurality. One-hundred-and-fifty children ranging in age from 22 to 36…

This article questions how two very similar sets of experiments can yield such very different findings, and comments on the differences between the studies. Here Annamarie Kerkhoff presents a commentary on some perceived differences between the studies in areas such as age groups and group sizes evaluated. Kerkhoff also comments on some…

Infants across cultures need to identify the characteristics of their native languages in order to become competent speakers. The means by which Spanish-speaking children learn to produce number-gender linguistic markers has not been sufficiently investigated. Thirty-eight three-year-olds were tested in Berko-like production tasks, in which they…

One of the most prominent issues in early cognitive and linguistic development concerns how children figure out meanings of words from hearing them in context, since in many contexts there are multiple words and multiple potential referents for those words. Recent findings concerning on-line sentence comprehension suggest that, within the…