Causal language is essential for children’s language development, helping them understand and explain the reasons behind events. This study focuses on children’s causal language production and the role of parental input, aiming to (1) investigate differences in maternal and paternal language use, (2) analyse children’s causal language production across tasks and communication partners, and (3) examine the relationship between parental input and children’s causal language skills. Sixty children aged 4–5 and their parents participated in dyadic sessions, which included free play, guided play, and storytelling tasks. Results showed that fathers used more causal language than mothers during free play, and children also produced more causal language with their fathers in this context compared to storytelling. Overall, both maternal and paternal causal language inputs were linked to children’s causal language production, highlighting the significant influence of parental input on language development.

Children appear well positioned to use questions as a tool to learn words. We investigate whether asking questions improves children’s word retention compared to listening. Four- to six-year-olds (N = 64, English speaking) were randomly assigned to a Question-Asking or a Listening condition. In both conditions, children were asked to retrieve a novel object from an array of novel objects. In the Question-Asking condition, children were given time to ask questions to help them select the correct object, but in the Listening condition they were not. Participants in both conditions received the same information about the objects, and both groups retained the novel words. Surprisingly, children who had the opportunity to ask questions selected targets at the same rates as those who passively listened. These results provide suggestive evidence that the simple act of asking a question about a new word does not provide a boost for retention.

Linguistic context supports children’s verb learning. For example, upon hearing “the boy is pilking,” children can infer that the novel verb pilk names an action that a boy (rather than a girl) engages in. However, more information, such as a modified subject (e.g. “the tall boy is pilking”), could hinder rather than aid due to increased processing load, as suggested by a previous study with English-learning toddlers (He et al., 2020, Language Learning and Development 16, 22–42). In the current study, we found that Korean-learning preschoolers also experienced difficulty when the verb appeared with a modified subject compared to an unmodified one; this difficulty persisted across three situational contexts, even when the additional information was necessary to identify the referent. Our findings, with a typologically different language and diverse contexts, provide cross-linguistic support for prior results in English, consistent with a conceptual replication of the idea that less information can sometimes be more beneficial for learning.

The study explored monolingual German-speaking preschoolers’ skills in accusative and dative case marking with local prepositions, the types of errors they made, and whether age can explain their performance. To test the ability of preschoolers (n = 59, age range 4;5–6;5) to mark case assigned by one-case and two-case prepositions, a comprehension and a production task were designed. The children in general performed more accurately on accusative than on dative and on case marking with one-case prepositions than with two-case prepositions. A general production/comprehension asymmetry was not attested. However, the participants revealed the most difficulty in producing dative case and overgeneralized accusative to dative case contexts. Age affected the children’s case marking skills, with older children performing more accurately on one-case prepositions than younger children. Thus, the ability to mark case assigned by prepositions in German, especially dative case, is not completed by school entry.

This retrospective study investigates two questions: (a) whether speech sound difficulties, reported by parents looking back on their children’s early speech sound skills and concurrently at ages 7–8, can predict language comprehension and early reading challenges in children identified as poor readers and (b) whether there is a relationship between the type of speech errors and language comprehension and early reading skills in these children. Two hundred twenty-eight children identified as poor readers were assessed on reading and language comprehension. The findings revealed that children whose parents reported early speech sound difficulties, and those with speech sound difficulties at ages 7–8, had significantly poorer language comprehension compared to children without a history of speech sound difficulties. This difference in language comprehension skills persisted after controlling for phoneme awareness. Additionally, both delayed and disordered speech errors significantly predicted difficulties in language comprehension compared to children without speech sound difficulties.

Monolingual children tend to assume that a word labels only one object, and this mutual exclusivity supports referent selection and retention of novel words. Bilingual children accept two labels for an object (lexical overlap) for referent selection more than monolingual children, but in these previous studies, information about speakers’ language backgrounds was minimal. We investigated monolingual and bilingual 4-year-old children’s ability to apply mutual exclusivity and lexical overlap flexibly when objects were labelled either by one or two speakers with the same or different language backgrounds. We tested referent selection and retention of word–object mappings. Both language groups performed similarly for mutual exclusivity, were more likely to accept lexical overlap in the two-language than one-language condition, and performance was similar for referent selection and later retention. Monolingual and bilingual children can adapt their word-learning strategies to cope with the demands of different linguistic contexts.

Using a priming picture-description, a digital recall and a non-word repetition task, this study tested 18 four- to six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and 25 age-matched typically developing (TD) children to examine the performance of children with DLD in producing grammatical aspect and the links of their performance to verbal working memory (VWM). Results indicated that children with DLD performed worse in producing individual aspect markers than TD children, showing better performance on the preverbal zai- than on the post-verbal markers. They showed better performance in producing imperfective than perfective aspect. Heterogeneous performance was noted in aspectual production within the DLD group, but only performance on -guo and perfective aspect significantly correlated with their VWM. Findings highlight the importance of positional and aspectual distinctions in assessment and intervention for Mandarin-speaking children with DLD, and they provide language-specific evidence for cross-linguistic asymmetries in aspect acquisition in language disorders.

Prediction is a central feature of mature language comprehension, but little is known about how and when it develops. This study investigates whether lexical prediction emerges before seven using a novel, naturalistic cloze task. Five and six-year-old children listened to a storybook and occasionally guessed which word might come next. We selected 180 words from the story that were shown to be more or less predictable in a prior cloze norming task with adults. We found that children frequently guessed the correct word or provided an alternative that was semantically related to the target, demonstrating an ability to use the context to explicitly predict upcoming words. Six-year-olds were more accurate than 5-year-olds. These findings show prediction is present (but still improving) in early childhood, motivating future work on the role of prediction in children’s comprehension and learning. Finally, we demonstrate that it is feasible to collect cloze values from children.

This study piloted CHIPUTIL, an automated tool in CLAN for analysing sequential lexical overlap in parent–child conversations. In a sample of 44 dyads (child age M = 1;9), child spontaneous lexical overlap was positively associated with parent imitations and expansions, across the conversation and within sequential turns. Children were more than twice as likely to respond with lexical overlap when parents first produced an imitation or expansion. These findings offer insight into how lexical overlap may unfold in early conversations. We discuss implications of automated coding and future directions in exploring the role of lexical overlap in children’s language development.

Encoding only-type exclusive focus in discourse involves complex computation and integration of knowledge from multiple linguistic domains. We present a comprehensive analysis of syntactic, semantic, prosodic, and discourse contextual features of 864 utterances with only and its Mandarin equivalents zhi(you) produced by Mandarin–English bilingual preschoolers and matched monolinguals (age 2–6, Study 1), and by Mandarin-speaking parents (Study 2), all sampled from naturalistic interactions. The results revealed largely target-like syntactic positioning and semantic association of only and zhi(you) in both languages in the bilinguals, with cross-linguistic influence between only and zhi. Interestingly, the bilingual children, like their Mandarin monolingual peers, employed longer duration but not raised mean pitch to shift the prosodic stress to the intended focus, although both acoustic features, in addition to positional and contextual cues, were instantiated in the focus utterances in the Mandarin parental input, suggesting prolonged development in focus-prosody mapping in children independent of bilingualism.

Words in infant-directed speech (IDS) are often phonetically reduced. This likely renders words harder for infants to learn and recognize. This difficulty might be mitigated by the repetitive nature of IDS, in particular if reduced instances are often preceded by clear instances (i.e., the first-mention effect). To characterize phonetic clarity in American English word repetitions, words were extracted from the IDS of eight mothers and presented to adults (n = 36) who judged their clarity. First mentions of repeated words were found to be clearer than second mentions, though this effect was small. Clarity was rated as greater for less common words and for utterance-final words. Clarity was also greater for words parents thought their child knew. The results help guide intuitions about the phonetic problem infants face when learning their first words.

A growing literature explores the representational detail of infants’ early lexical representations, but no study has investigated how exposure to real-life acoustic-phonetic variation impacts these representations. Indeed, previous experimental work with young infants has largely ignored the impact of accent exposure on lexical development. We ask how routine exposure to accent variation affects 6-month-olds’ ability to detect mispronunciations. Forty-eight monolingual English-learning 6-month-olds participated. Mono-accented infants, exposed to minimal accent variation, detected vowel mispronunciations in their own name. Multi-accented infants, exposed to high levels of accent variation, did not. Accent exposure impacts speech processing at the earliest stages of lexical acquisition.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers have difficulty comprehending and producing English plural morphology. This study investigated their comprehension and production of the plural at primary-school age using novel words, to better understand their mental representation of plural morphology. Thirty 5- to 9-year-old DHH children and 31 children with normal hearing (NH) completed a two-alternative forced-choice comprehension task and a wug production task. Performance was not significantly poorer for DHH children, though some morphophonological contexts proved challenging for both groups. Performance was correlated with vocabulary size. This suggests that, if DHH children have sufficient vocabulary, they may perform like primary school NH peers in plural comprehension and production.

Demonstratives and locative adverbs cross-linguistically are typically acquired relatively late, with children initially overusing proximal forms. However, these findings are largely based on research in languages with only two or three demonstratives. It is unclear whether the findings extend to languages with more complex systems. The present study examines data from Inuktitut, a language of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan family, which has 20 demonstrative roots and 10 locative adverb roots representing six spatial distinctions. It uses data from 18 Inuktitut speakers (8–60 years) to investigate the target-like use of demonstratives/locatives and data from eight Inuktitut-speaking children (1–4 years) and their mothers to determine the acquisition trajectories of these structures. Children initially used only the proximal demonstratives/locatives, which aligns with prior research. The proportion of proximal forms out of all others decreased significantly with mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUm), and by MLUm 2.50, children were using the full demonstrative/locative paradigm in a target-like manner. This differs from prior research and highlights the importance of language diversity in acquisition research.

Arabic emphatic consonants are claimed to be late-acquired, likely due to their motoric complexity, involving both coronal and pharyngeal/uvular constrictions. Children’s production has largely been studied using impressionistic data, with limited acoustic analysis. This study acoustically examines the acquisition of emphatic consonants in Saudi-Hijazi Arabic-speaking children aged 3–6 years. Thirty-eight children performed a real-word repetition task, after which consonantal and vocalic cues to the plain–emphatic contrast were measured. Results show that children produce both types of acoustic cues, with an age-related increase in the acoustic contrast and an overall alignment with adult patterns. Larger acoustic contrasts were found in vowels preceding rather than following consonants in word-medial positions, with no evidence for a difference between word-initial and word-final positions. The plain–emphatic contrast was greater for stops than fricatives and larger for female than male children. These findings are discussed in relation to the development of coarticulated consonants.

The current study probes Mandarin-learning toddlers’ sensitivity to two grammatical noun phrase orders differing in typological markedness. With three visual fixation experiments, we find that by age 2;6, children distinguish the cross-linguistically common order – but not the typologically rare one – from an ungrammatical order; however, their sensitivity to the two grammatical orders does not differ significantly. Further, we conduct a corpus analysis and demonstrate that for early acquisition, both grammatical orders are neither sufficiently nor consistently supported in the linguistic input. The sensitivity patterns and input profile outlined in our study constitute the first step of testing, in a natural language setting, a bias for typologically common ordering discussed in the artificial language learning literature. Although the findings remain inconclusive, they underscore the potential for future investigations in this direction.

This longitudinal study investigates the changes in bilingual oral language proficiency and home language and literacy practices of young Chinese American and Mexican American dual language learners (DLLs) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that DLLs represent a significant portion of young children in the U.S., often facing socioeconomic challenges, understanding their language development is crucial. The pandemic’s considerable impact on the educational trajectories of low-income immigrant communities is of particular concern. The sample comprised 132 DLLs (41 Mexican Americans and 91 Chinese Americans) from low-income immigrant families. Data on oral language proficiency in English and the home language and home literacy practices were collected before the pandemic and again 1.5 years later. Despite school closures, both groups showed improved oral language proficiency and shifts in home literacy practices over time. This study reveals distinct relationships between home literacy practices and oral language proficiency in the two immigrant groups.

Recent research has shown that 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with -s, like babs, that are embedded in passages, with just the stem bab, demonstrating an early sensitivity to morphological relatedness. This study builds on these findings by investigating the role of allomorphy in early morphological acquisition. We tested whether infants relate novel words suffixed with [-z] and [-s] allomorphs of the -s suffix and their stems. We find that English-learning 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with the [-z], but not [-s], allomorph with stems, providing evidence for an acquisition trajectory where infants discover morphemes one allomorph at a time.

This study aimed to explore the effect of various feedback types on word learning in preschool children, with consideration of the word’s morpho-phonological structure. Sixty-three five-year-old children participated in three sessions of learning artificial words derived from pseudo-roots in Hebrew, with half constructed using established morpho-phonological patterns. Participants received either no feedback, verification feedback, corrective feedback, or verification plus corrective feedback. The training encompassed word identification and production. Accuracy and reaction time (RT) were measured. The results indicated that corrective feedback produced the highest accuracy and fastest RTs. Providing verification feedback led to improved performance compared to no feedback. While words with existing morpho-phonological patterns were learned more efficiently, the positive impact of corrective feedback remained consistent across both word types. These findings offer practical implications for optimizing word learning conditions, highlighting the importance of corrective feedback in word learning, and more broadly, aligning the feedback type to the learning task.