Children's language development is a core task in Swedish preschool and central to how educators organize teaching and everyday activities. The curriculum's definition of language is described as extended, with language as both a prerequisite for learning and a learning effect, i.e. both internal processes and communication. This means that…

Usage-based theories of language development underscore the importance of children using language to learn language. Few investigations have applied usage-based theories to dual language learners (DLLs), who comprise a growing share of children attending early education programs in the U.S. Three studies were carried out to investigate the role of…

The current study quantitatively applies Spolsky's triangular framework of language policy, including beliefs, practices, and management, to the family domain by investigating language policy in multilingual families in Belgium's Flemish Community. Firstly, we examine whether the three components in fact call for an independent description and…

This study examines the potential of educational media to provide preschool-aged dual language learners (DLLs) with vocabulary in a new language. Drawing from dual-coding theory, the current study investigated how three distinct instructional contexts with varying degrees of incidental-intentional vocabulary exposure on screen might facilitate…

At the preschool level in Malaysia, all preschools, including those from public and private sectors are required to follow the guidelines stated in the National Preschool Standard-based Curriculum (NPSC) issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in 2017. However, the NPSC is very general and schools are not provided with any further guidance on…

This study investigates Spolsky's conception of language policy as the amalgam of language beliefs, language practices and language management. To the best of our knowledge, no quantitative evidence has ever been produced for his theoretical model. The current paper addressed this void, albeit specifically in the domain of Early Childhood Care and…

This study investigated the manner in which 56 infant educators used language to direct the behaviour of infants (defined as children aged birth to two years), on the basis that the ways in which educators frame their commands represent an important component of young children's learning experiences. Underpinned by systemic functional linguistic…

Based on an analysis of the video recording and transcript of one lesson chosen by preschool teachers in Luxembourg as an example of translanguaging pedagogy, this article shows the teachers' limited understandings of translanguaging. As a result of a new 2017 multilingual education policy for early childhood, the first author designed a…

Cross-linguistically, monolingual children produce target-like inflected verbs much earlier than they can reliably distinguish between singular and plural subject-verb agreement morphology in comprehension (i.e. Johnson, V., J. de Villiers, and H. Seymour. 2005. "Agreement Without Understanding? The Case of Third Person Singular /s/."…

This article describes a procedure to aid in the clinical appraisal of child speech. The approach, based on the work by Dinnsen, Chin, Elbert, and Powell (1990; Some constraints on functionally disordered phonologies: Phonetic inventories and phonotactics. "Journal of Speech and Hearing Research", 33, 28-37), uses a railway idiom to track gains in…

Communication is a multidimensional process. No matter what the field of the interaction is, there is always a crucial point in terms of the negotiation of social roles. This becomes more apparent in the field of education where institutional norms influence not only the children's behaviour, but at the same time the shaping of their…

Against the background of the increasing number of multilingual children with atypical language development around the world, this study reports research results on grammatical word class processing involving children with specific language impairment (SLI). The study investigates lexical retrieval of verbs (through picture-naming actions) and…

Across languages, onsets with large sonority distances are preferred to those with smaller distances (e.g., "bw greater than bd greater than lb"; Greenberg 1978). Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) attributes such facts to grammatical restrictions that are universally active in all grammars. To test this hypothesis, here we…

Longitudinal word learning studies which control for experience can advance understanding of language learning and potential intra- and inter-language relationships in developing bilinguals. We examined novel word learning in both the first (L1) and the second (L2) languages of bilingual children. The rate and shape of change as well as the role…

This study describes the dimensionality and continuum of Spanish phonological awareness (PA) skills in 3- to 6-year-old children. A 3 x 4 factorial design crossed word structure of test items (word, syllable, phoneme) with task (blending multiple-choice, blending free-response, elision multiple-choice, elision free-response) to assess 12 PA…