Research suggests that elements of the family environment may have significant associations with cognitive and language development outcomes. Less is known, however, about the family environment in peri-urban China, where rates of cognitive and language delay in children aged 0-3 years are as high as 51% and 54%, respectively. Using data collected…

Purpose: This mixed-methods study examined how differences in parental time, knowledge, and economic constraints, as well as community socioeconomic contexts, may contribute to differences in home language environment and child language ability outcomes between peri-urban and rural households in China. Method: We conducted an explanatory…

Objective: This study was designed to produce a new parent-report measure, the Diagnostic Receptive Expressive Assessment of Mandarin-Infant Toddler Assessment of Communication and Language (DREAM-IT) in order to provide norms for the developmental skills of children aged 0-36 months in four areas: expressive language, receptive language,…

Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a…

Extending new verbs is important in becoming a productive speaker of a language. Prior results show children have difficulty extending verbs when they have seen events with varied agents. This study further examines the impact of variability on verb learning and asks whether variability interacts with event complexity or differs by language.…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

Purpose: The communication development of children adopted from China and Eastern Europe was compared by region of origin at 6 and 12 months after adoption. Method: Twenty children, recruited before or immediately following their adoption, participated in the study. Measures were collected between 2 and 6 months after adoption (Time 1) and between…

Caregivers of 608 (331 boys and 277 girls) children in Shanghai, China reported on their children's language development and on the language teaching practices used in the home. The children were between 24 and 47 months old. The relation of age-corrected language level to paternal education, child gender, and teaching practice use was examined.…

Using Scotton's model of codeswitching based on markedness theory, this paper examines a type of register variation known as "babytalk," defined as ambiguous talk of babies or young children and talk to babies or young children. It is argued that babytalk and the voice of authority are motivated by Chinese cultural assumptions about…