Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive…

Vocabulary size is a crucial early indicator of language development, for both monolingual and bilingual children. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because they learn words in two languages, and there remains significant controversy about how to best measure their vocabulary size, especially in relation to monolinguals. This…

Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In…

Maternal input addressed to children after an early hospitalization (EH) was longitudinally compared to maternal input directed to typically developing children (TD), at 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months of age. The data were analyzed with the CHILDES tools for (a) word-tokens (b) word-types (c) Mean Length of Utterances (MLU) and (d) questions in which…

This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of "language management" -- that is, a way of influencing children's language practices. We introduce the distinction between child-directed resources (i.e. those providing parents with opportunities to engage with their children in the languages they are transmitting) and…

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., "that," "there") from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of…

In a simultaneous bilingual education, there are many factors that can affect its success, primarily the age of the child and socio-cognitive elements. This phenomenon can be initially studied in the first lexical productions of either language in a child. The present study focuses on the early lexical developments of a child, who lives in the…

Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this…

Dynamic analyses of language growth tell us how vocabulary and grammar develop and how the two might be intertwined. Analyses of growth curves between 17 and 42 months, based on longitudinal data for 34 children, revealed interesting patterns of vocabulary and grammatical developments. They showed that these patterns were nonlinear, but with…

This paper compared the vocabulary size of a group of 250 bilinguals aged 24-36 months acquiring six different language pairs using an analogous tool, and attempted to identify factors that influence vocabulary sizes and ultimately place children at risk for language delay. Each research group used adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative…

The present study explores the vocabulary development of bilingual children when neither of their languages has a minority language status. With both languages having high relative prestige, it is possible to address the impact of exposure variables: age of onset, length of exposure, and frequency of exposure (FoE) to both languages. Parents of 40…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children from 10 non-English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with adapted versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08 to 2.06. The results showed that girls are…