The aim of the current study is to determine what language activities Norwegian preschool children took part in, and to examine whether these language activities predict children's language comprehension. We tested children (n = 134) with language measures at age 4/5 and age 5/6 and interviewed their teachers (n = 71) about the kinds of language…

When preschoolers listen to storybooks, are their eye movements related to their vocabulary acquisition in this context? This study addressed this question with 36 four-year-old French-speaking participants by assessing their general receptive vocabulary knowledge and knowledge of low-frequency words in 3 storybooks. These books were read verbatim…

Little of 150 years of research in Cognitive Neurosciences, Human Factors, and the mathematics of Production Management have found their way into educational policy and certainly not into the classroom or in the production of educational materials in any meaningful or practical fashion. Whilst more mundane concepts of timing, sequencing, spatial…

Mathematical development processes begin long before school starts and the importance of previous mathematical knowledge for later school achievements is beyond dispute. For a suitable pre-school education, the focus of interest must be to find out which early learning processes prepare children best. In this article, the acquisition of the key…

The last decade has produced an explosion in neuroscience research examining young children's early processing of language that has implications for education. Noninvasive, safe functional brain measurements have now been proven feasible for use with children starting at birth. In the arena of language, the neural signatures of learning can be…

This study assesses morpho-phonological alternation in plural formation by 5-year-old Dutch children with a familial risk of dyslexia, children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing children. The morpho-phonological process investigated is the voicing alternation in Dutch singular-plural pairs such as bed [t]…

Infants' auditory processing abilities have been shown to predict subsequent language development. In addition, poor auditory processing skills have been shown for some individuals with specific language impairment. Methods used in infant studies are not appropriate for use with young children, and neither are methods typically used to test…

This paper reports on an investigation of children's (aged 3;5-9;8) comprehension of sentences containing ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment. Results from a picture selection study (N=90) showed that children use verb semantics and preposition type to resolve the ambiguity, with older children also showing sensitivity to the…

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency…

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a…