We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

When young children interpret novel nouns, they tend to be very much affected by the perceptual features of the referent objects, especially shape. This article investigates whether children might inhibit a prepotent tendency to base novel nouns on the shape of referent objects in order to base them on conceptual features (i.e. taxonomic object…

This cross-linguistic study investigated whether the native language has any influence on lexical composition among Italian (N = 125) and Finnish (N = 116) very preterm (born at <32 gestational weeks) children at 24 months (controls: 125 Italian and 146 Finnish full-term children). The investigation also covered the effect of maternal education…

Early language development is characterized by predictable changes in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. In infants, these changes could reflect increasing linguistic expertise or cognitive maturation and development. To disentangle these factors, we compared the acquisition of English in internationally-adopted…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…

Numerous studies have proposed that changes of the human language faculty caused by neural maturation can explain the substantial differences in ultimate attainment of grammatical competences between first language (L1) acquirers and second language (L2) learners. However, little evidence on the effect of neural maturation on the attainment of…

Two experiments investigated the development of fluency in interpreting adjective-noun phrases in 30- and 36-month-old English-learning children. Using online processing measures, children's gaze patterns were monitored as they heard the familiar adjective-noun phrases (e.g. "blue car") in visual contexts where the adjective was either informative…

Children at three age levels were administered Schutz and Keislar's word-span task using nouns, verbs and functors as stimuli. (Author/RM)

Describes a study designed to clarify the relationships among young children's age, reasoning ability, ability to add regular and irregular plurals to real and nonsense count nouns and testing methods. Discusses age as a factor employed to indicate how the use of plurals changes over time. (MES)

Four experiments with 36 infants studied how children organize objects categorically in the absence of input. Outcomes were not consistent with the predictions of bias accounts and considerably weaken the case for a psychologically real noun-bias prior to the vocabulary explosion. Findings are more consistent with children's use of information as…

This study examined how novel words foster the formation of object categories for 12- to 13-month olds. Results indicated that by 12 to 13 months, infants have begun to distinguish between novel words presented as count nouns versus adjectives in fluent, infant-directed speech, and that infants' expectations for novel words accord with this…

A total of 34 children, ages 2 and a half to 6, were presented with sentences for imitation that either violated or honored a prenominal adjective ordering rule, which requires that size adjectives must precede color adjectives. Two response measures were evaluated in terms of these sentence types: latency to begin a sentence imitation and recall…

Three experiments examined preschoolers' and adults' understanding of distinctive semantic functions of adjectives and count nouns. Found that 4-year olds and adults, but not 3-year olds, who heard the adjective version (e.g., "a blue bird") were more likely than those who heard the count noun version ("a bluebird") to choose…

A study of the development of abstract noun definitions in children and adolescents had as its subjects 120 students evenly divided into age groups of 10-, 14-, and 18-year-olds, randomly selected from students scoring in the 40th to 88th percentiles on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (for 10-year-olds) and the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency…

Students, ages 12, 15, 18, and 23 (n=60 per group), wrote definitions for 16 abstract nouns. Responses were analyzed for Aristotelian style. There was an increasing tendency for students to mention the appropriate category to which a word belongs, core features of the word, and subtle aspects of meaning. (DB)