Purpose: Production of complex syntax is a hallmark of later language development; however, most of the research examining age-related changes has focused on adolescents or analyzed narrative language samples. Research documenting age-related changes in the production of complex syntax in elementary school-aged children in conversational language…

Purpose: This study examines whether differences in acquisition exist among the inflectional constructions of number, gender, possessive pronouns, and tense. Moreover, the study investigates whether these inflectional patterns develop with age. Method: The participants were 1,020 Arabic-speaking kindergartners from K2 and K3. Children were…

The objective of this study was to examine the development of derivational morphological structures in the productive language of Kuwaiti Arabic (KA)-speaking children. Participants were 512 typically developing Kuwaiti children aged 3;0 years to 7;11 years (243 boys and 269 girls). Five age groups at 1-year intervals were tested; each group was…

This study investigated the acquisition of word-patterns and roots in the nominal system of the spoken language of Palestinian Arabic (PA) and its distance from Standard Arabic (StA). It described, analyzed, and quantified the nominal system (roots and word-patterns) as reflected in the language corpus of Palestinian-Arab kindergarteners 3 to 6…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

Deaf students often differ from their hearing peers in written language development. Providing developmentally appropriate instruction is ideal, yet current methods of writing assessment do not provide teachers with sufficient information regarding the written language (i.e., syntactic) development of deaf students. In this research, we use a…

This study sought to explore the advanced lexicon, one of the hallmarks of text quality. To this end, we analysed the advanced lexicon deployed in the production of two types of texts -- a descriptive and an argumentative -- by Hebrew-speaking school children. Our study had two goals, the first to trace the developmental path of the use of…

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of code-switching in the narratives of dual-language Latino preschoolers, specifically by examining its incidence, types, functions, and grammaticality. Previous work has investigated code-switching in younger children and in older children and adults, but relatively little work has investigated…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the…

Deaf students often differ from their hearing peers in written language development. Providing developmentally appropriate instruction is ideal, yet current methods of writing assessment do not provide teachers with sufficient information regarding the written language (i.e., syntactic) development of deaf students. In this research, we use a…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further…

The study investigated the impact of language impairment and environmental deprivation on Hebrew morpho-lexical development across the school years. Participants were 659 grade school and middle school Hebrew-speaking students--typically developing and language impaired, from mid-high and from low socio-economic status (SES). They were all…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

This article defines the concepts related to symbolic and sign representations, cognition and learning in the early years. The first study experiment of teaching 33 preschool children (19 boys and 14 girls; M = 68, 5 months) the notion of rainbow phenomenon proved the equal effectiveness of the use of both sign and symbolic tools. The second study…