In this qualitative study, the author investigated nature as a context for language development. Participants included 15 toddlers and their caretakers who enrolled in a series of environmental education workshops on the topics of grass, butterflies, spiders, and leaves. Using field notes and photographs, the study sought to investigate elements…

Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2- to 6-year-old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations…

The intervention study investigated the effects of an interactive word-learning app Learning apps are developed to achieve certain aims. In our case, the intention was to enrich the vocabulary acquisition of young children. Many other apps, such as games, are developed mainly for entertainment. The intention of games apps is to hold the attention…

Spontaneous verbal repetition is part of early adult-child conversational interchanges. However, most of the studies devoted to verbal repetition analyse child-produced and adult-produced repetition independently. The aim of this study is to analyse verbal repetition sequences that are extended by children and adults participating in turns. We…

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…

Theories of language acquisition have highlighted the importance of adult speakers as active participants in children's language learning. However, in many communities children are reported to be directly engaged by their caregivers only rarely (Lieven, 1994). This observation raises the possibility that these children learn language from…

Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of…

Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel…

Aims to give a thorough analysis of the morphosyntax produced at the outset of multi-word speech, with a classification of free language produced at 2 years by 27 French-speaking children. A classification performed with word sequences reveals surprisingly adult-like sequences of syntactic categories of words. (Author/VWL)

Observation of adult response to children's initial overextensions (use of the correct label, correction of error, and demonstration of object attributes) revealed that demonstrations were the most important factor in inducing toddlers to assign an object to its adult category. (Author/CB)

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)

Investigates whether children ages 1;6 just beginning to learn words can learn new words in a variety of nonostensive contexts. The results of two studies involving adults interacting with children in games of searching for objects suggest that from very early in language acquisition, children learn words through active attempts to understand…