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.

We present a simulation study based on a cognitive architecture that unifies various early language acquisition phenomena in laboratory and naturalistic settings. The model adaptively learns procedures through trial-and-error using general-purpose operators, guided by learned contextual associations to optimise future performance. For laboratory-based studies, simulated preferential focusing explains the delayed behavioural onset of statistical learning and the possible age-related decrease in algebraic processing. These findings suggest a link to continuous, implicit learning rather than explicit strategy acquisition. Moreover, procedures are not static but can evolve over time, and multiple plausible procedures may emerge for a given task. Besides, the same model provides a proof-of-concept for word-level phonological learning from naturalistic infant-directed speech, demonstrating how age-related processing efficiency may influence learning trajectories implicated in typical and atypical early language development. Furthermore, the artile discusses the broader implications for modelling other aspects of real-world language acquisition.

Children are known to derive more implicatures when the required alternative is made salient through contrast or when it is made contextually relevant through a story or a Question Under Discussion. We investigated the exclusivity implicature of three disjunctions (sau “or”, sau… sau, and fie…fie “either…or”) in child Romanian, an understudied language in the previous literature. Three experiments reveal that the mere presence of the stronger alternative, that is, simply hearing unrelated conjunctive statements in the course of the experiment, is not enough to boost implicatures. Rather, implicatures increase as a result of both access to alternatives and contextual relevance (expressed through conjunctive questions such as Did the hen push the train and the boat?). Interestingly, the boost in implicatures was observed only for sau-based disjunctions, not for fie…fie, which we conjecture may be due to children treating the latter as ambiguous between disjunction and conjunction.

The current study characterized voice onset time (VOT) and vowel onset fundamental frequency (F0) in the production of three Vietnamese alveolar stops (i.e. /t̪ʰ/, /t/, and /d/) by monolingual Vietnamese children and adults. Eighty Vietnamese children aged 3–7 years and 16 adults aged 22–44 years participated in this study. Unlike speakers of other languages with a three-way voicing contrast, Vietnamese children were able to produce distinct categories for the three Vietnamese stop categories by 3 years of age. However, differences in vowel onset F0 among the three voicing categories were not significant in any age group. These findings enhance our understanding of how Vietnamese children acquire three-way voicing contrast in stop production and offer broader insights into stop consonant acquisition across languages.

The present study examines whether presenting words in song versus spoken sentences can lead to differences in word learning in 47–50-month-old children. This work extends previous findings on this topic and evaluates whether the location of pitch changes within the song may contribute to how well the words are learned. Using a Preferential Looking Paradigm, 32 children were taught the names of objects, either in spoken sentences or in a song that followed an unfamiliar melody. In both conditions, the novel word was emphasized by a pitch change. Looking patterns indicated that children learned the names of the novel items better when the words were trained in the spoken sentence compared to the song condition. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of word learning, and how differences in the characteristics between speech and song may relate to variability in how well new words are acquired.

Recent evidence from cross-situational learning (CSL) studies have shown that adult learners can acquire words and grammar simultaneously when sentences of the novel language co-occur with dynamic scenes to which they refer. Syntactic bootstrapping accounts suggest that grammatical knowledge may help scaffold vocabulary acquisition by constraining possible meanings, thus, for children, words and grammar may be acquired at different rates. Twenty children (ages 8 to 9) were exposed in a CSSL study to an artificial language comprising nouns, verbs, and case markers occurring within a verb-final grammatical structure. Children acquired syntax (i.e., word order) effectively, but we found no evidence of vocabulary learning, whereas previous adult studies showed learning of both from similar input. Grammatical information may thus be available early for children, to help constrain and support later vocabulary learning. We propose that gradual maturation of declarative memory systems may result in more effective vocabulary learning in adults.

While a role of language in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) is well established, the interplay with a child’s ability to understand structured scenarios remains unclear. A new scale (Pictorial Theory of Mind Scale), assessing true and false belief comprehension at different levels of linguistic complexity, was used to explore language effects on ToM while accounting for scenario comprehension. Thirty-nine children (aged 4–6 years; 53.8% female) participated in this study. Results showed that 46.8% of 4- to 6-year-olds can understand false beliefs from picture-based scenarios with limited language output. Both language and scenario comprehension contributed to ToM in first-order false beliefs, whereas only scenario comprehension predicted true beliefs. In contrast, only language predicted second-order false beliefs, highlighting their different roles in ToM development.

We present a new corpus of child and child-directed speech (CDS) in Palestinian Arabic. It includes transcriptions following the CHILDES guidelines and features recordings of 16 monolingual Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with an age range of 19–58 months and their adult interlocutors. We analyse the children’s morphosyntactic development and identify a variety of target word orders (45 in child speech, 50 in CDS), with prevalent SV(O) structures; we also found high rates of null subjects in both populations, marginal errors in children’s verbal agreement morphology, and early emergence of serial verb constructions, observed from 23 months of age.

This study assessed the association between home learning environment (HLE) at 3 years of age and children’s concurrent and longitudinal vocabulary skills. HLE consisted of the following activities done with primary caregivers: storytelling, drawing, music, toys and games, everyday home activities, playing outdoors, and reading. Results demonstrated that a higher HLE score at 3 years was concurrently related to higher expressive vocabulary and grammar scores, and longitudinally to higher receptive language scores from 5 to 9 years of age. Taken together, these findings suggest that children’s HLE represents a significant contributor to children’s concurrent and longitudinal language skills.

We present the typological approach to child language research. The typological approach places language diversity at the centre of acquisition research, thereby limiting arbitrary adjustments to theory and practice. We apply the typological approach to Ingram’s (2002) measures of whole-word phonological complexity (PMLU) and proximity (PWP). Our generalised PMLUg measure takes into account crosslinguistic variation in word status, including complex predicates and words without vowels. We analysed conversational data from Dutch, English, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Xi’iùy to determine whether two-year-old children target and produce words with significant between-language differences in phonological complexity. We found significant between-language differences in PMLUg for the target and produced words, but not PWPg. Comparing the complexity of the children’s words with the complexity of target words reveals their growth potentials along the syllable and consonant dimensions. Our study begins the cumulative investigation of the features that determine whole-word phonological complexity and proximity crosslinguistically.

We examined the direct and indirect associations between home literacy environment (HLE) and children’s listening comprehension and word reading in Chinese. Three hundred forty-seven Chinese kindergarten children (mean age = 74.01 months, 50% female) were tested on measures of pinyin letter knowledge, phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, and listening comprehension. Their parents completed a questionnaire about their socioeconomic status and the three aspects of HLE (code-related and meaning-related HLE, access to literacy resources). Results of path analysis showed that access to literacy resources was indirectly associated with both listening comprehension and word reading through the effects of phonological awareness and vocabulary. These findings suggest that in the early phases of language and literacy development, print materials in the home may be important not only for written-language skills but also for oral-language skills.

Sentences with a plural subject receive a distributive reading if the predicate refers to the atomic members, or a collective one if it relates to the whole group. Previous accounts suggest that the distributive representation includes an additional semantic operator, and comprehension experiments show that adults interpret an ambiguous sentence as collective. However, children accept distributive readings more frequently, questioning their presumed greater difficulty. The current study investigates these interpretations in a novel way through a production study, where Italian adults and preschoolers described distributive and collective pictures. Adults produced more distributive expressions, in line with semantic theories and psycholinguistic findings. Preschoolers, however, showed limited sensitivity to the need for disambiguating markers, showing in particular that knowledge of distributive quantifiers is not fully acquired by the age of five, at least in the production domain. We discuss our results at the intersection of language acquisition, semantic theories, and cognitive development.

This study explores the relationships among socioeconomic status (SES), executive function (EF), grammar comprehension (GC), and pragmatic language (PL) in children aged 8–11. By employing a structural equation modelling approach, we aimed to investigate the direct and indirect effects of these variables on PL, a crucial aspect of child development involved in the formation of social relationships and general well-being. Our final sample consisted of 128 children from a heterogeneous socioeconomic context. Participants were assessed using the APL Medea, TROG-2, and TeleFE tests to measure their PL, GC, and EF, respectively. The findings reveal that GC and EF are important predictors of PL, with GC playing an important role in mediating the effects of SES. In conclusion, this study highlights the key role of GC in connecting SES and PL, with strong practical implications for the interventions aimed at mitigating the adverse effects of socioeconomic factors.

Book-sharing interactions expose children to diverse language input, yet most research on parent–child book-sharing has focused on monolingual parents reading monolingual books. This study investigated how Latine bilingual parents in the U.S. share different types of books with their children. Twenty-four Latine parents and their three- to five-year-old children shared a monolingual English-only book and a bilingual English-Spanish book. Parents used a higher proportion of total words and different words in Spanish when sharing the bilingual book than the monolingual book. They also engaged in more code-switching with the bilingual book than the English monolingual book. There were no differences in the number or diversity of words in English between book types. These findings show that bilingual books increase parents’ use of the home language (in this case Spanish) relative to books in the societal language, and suggest they may be one way of supporting children’s dual language development.

In this study, we explore how children learn causatives from the language they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Previous research has argued that argument structure is a crucial facilitator for learning causatives. Here, we examine the role of argument structure in the acquisition of morphological and lexical causatives. We use Turkish as a test case which allows argument ellipsis and ask whether reliable argument expression is a key factor in learning causatives. We use longitudinal data of 7 children spanning from 8 to 36 months of age and their surrounding environment. We show that ellipsis in child-directed speech is pervasive for both lexical and morphological causatives. However, such pervasive ellipsis does not seem to influence the acquisition process. This suggests that argument structure may not play a major role in the learning of causatives in a natural learning environment.

This study investigated how infants deal with cross-talker variability in the perception of native lexical tones, paying specific attention to developmental changes and the role of task demands. Using the habituation-based visual fixation procedures, we tested Cantonese-learning infants of different age groups on their ability to discriminate Cantonese Tone 1 (high level) and Tone 3 (mid level) produced by either multiple talkers or a single talker. Results demonstrated that the 12-month-old and 24-month-old groups showed reliable discrimination across talkers, whereas the 18-month-old group did not (Experiment 1), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast when the talker was held constant (Experiment 2). In a task that included a novel object as a referent to the sound, the 18-month-olds discriminated the contrast across talkers from Tone 1 to Tone 3 (Experiment 3). These results revealed a U-shaped developmental path and perceptual asymmetry in native lexical tone discrimination across talkers.