Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

The Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., "tui dao" "push fall" and "pa shang" "climb ascend") encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we…

The contribution of parent input to children's subsequent expressive verb diversity was explored in twenty typically developing toddlers with small verb lexicons. Child developmental factors and parent input measures (i.e. verb quantity, verb diversity, and verb-related structural cues) at age 1;9 were examined as potential predictors of…

Purpose: The goals of this study were to quantify longitudinal expectations for verb lexicon growth and to determine whether verb lexicon measures were better predictors of later grammatical outcomes than noun lexicon measures. Method: Longitudinal parent-report measures from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al.,…

Purpose: The purpose of this initial feasibility study was to determine whether brief instruction in toy talk would change grammatical properties of adult language, specifically 3rd person lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects. Method: Eighteen college students participated in the study. The use of 3rd person subjects was examined before and after…

Purpose: In this response to Kamhi (2014), a sentence-focused framework is presented to help clinicians select treatment targets as part of a comprehensive approach to early grammatical intervention. Method: The literature on the relationship between lexical verbs, sentence structure, and tense/agreement morphemes is reviewed, and developmental…

Purpose: Evidence for tense marking in child-directed speech varies both across languages (Guasti, 2002; Legate & Yang, 2007) and across speakers of a single language (Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen, 2011). The purpose of this study was to understand how parent interaction styles and register use overlap with the tense-marking…

Grammatical development was examined for 10 children (ages 19 to 31 months) with expressive language impairments only and 10 children with both receptive- and expressive-language impairments. Group analyses did not reveal any differences between the subtypes on the Index of Productive Syntax. However, specific weakness in verb-phrase elaboration…

Examines the use of finiteness markers copula "BE" and auxiliaries "BE" and "DO" in the spontaneous speech of children with specific language impairment. Focus is on whether the categorical distinctions between main verbs and auxiliaries and/or between the auxiliary types influence the relative order of emergence…