Journal of Child Language最新文献

Children who receive cochlear implants develop spoken language on a protracted timescale. The home environment facilitates speech-language development, yet it is relatively unknown how the environment differs between children with cochlear implants and typical hearing. We matched eighteen preschoolers with implants (31-65 months) to two groups of children with typical hearing: by chronological age and hearing age. Each child completed a long-form, naturalistic audio recording of their home environment (appx. 16 hours/child; >730 hours of observation) to measure adult speech input, child vocal productivity, and caregiver-child interaction. Results showed that children with cochlear implants and typical hearing were exposed to and engaged in similar amounts of spoken language with caregivers. However, the home environment did not reflect developmental stages as closely for children with implants, or predict their speech outcomes as strongly. Home-based speech-language interventions should focus on the unique input-outcome relationships for this group of children with hearing loss.

Using both online and offline measures, this study investigates how maternal education and work status (stay-at-home, part-time, full-time) are jointly associated with infants' word learning ability and vocabulary size. One hundred 24-month-old infants completed a lab-based mutual exclusivity task, which assesses infants' novel word learning ability. Caregivers reported infants' productive vocabulary size using the MCDIs. There was no evidence for an association between infants' productive vocabulary size and maternal education, maternal work status, or their interaction. However, infants' novel word learning ability was significantly related to both maternal factors and their interaction. The positive association between maternal education and word learning performance was attenuated for infants of part-time and full-time working mothers compared to infants with at home mothers. These findings suggest that using real-time measures with high task demand may better capture developmental differences in infants and expand our understanding of maternal factors contributing to early language development.

Children's speech becomes longer and more complex as they develop, but the reasons for this have been insufficiently studied. This study examines how changing linguistic choices in children are linked to interactive factors by analysing Who-question sequences in Japanese child-caregiver conversations. The interactive factors in focus are progressivity and balanced joint activity, which are core aspects of conversational interaction. Our analysis reveals that as children respond to Who-questions, their responses grow in length and multifunctionality. This growth is positively associated with progressivity, namely a quicker completion of the question sequence, and reduced functional load in the interlocutor's contributions, resulting in more balanced joint activity. These findings suggest that children adapt their linguistic choices by observing and aligning them with their interactive goals in conversational sequences.

Children’s acquisition of variation in the target language depends on a number of factors not yet well understood. This study probes the acquisition of morphological variation in two unrelated languages, Croatian (Slavic) and Estonian (Finnic), focussing on parallel forms of a lexeme expressing a single grammatical category (a phenomenon known as morphological overabundance). We conducted a cross-linguistic elicitation experiment with 140 monolingual, typically developing children aged 3;0 to 6;11 (80 learning Croatian, 60 Estonian). We elicited genitive plural forms in Croatian and partitive plural in Estonian, with lexemes which either are invariant or allow more than one form. Children in both languages were less accurate with lexemes with parallel forms, indicating that the morphological variation hindered acquisition. Pattern type frequency was found to affect accuracy in both languages. Children’s choice between two parallel forms was unaffected by age, but significant language-specific differences emerged.

This study evaluates how language exposure and mothers’ language dominance relate to infants’ early bilingual vocabulary development in a low-socioeconomic status (SES) sample from an understudied population: Mexican Indigenous bilinguals. Thirty-two mother–child dyads participated. All mothers were bilingual speakers of Spanish and one of Mexican Indigenous languages, including Zapotec, Mixtec, and Otomi. Infants’ (between 16 and 37 months) vocabulary size was estimated in both languages using the Mexican Spanish version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI II. Infants’ language exposure, mothers’ bilingual profile, and their SES were estimated on numerical scales. The results of Spearman correlations showed infants’ vocabulary size in Spanish grows with age, while their vocabulary in the Indigenous language depends on relative language exposure. Mothers’ language dominance correlated with Indigenous language exposure and infants’ vocabulary size in the Indigenous language. These findings are discussed in the context of early bilingual vocabulary acquisition in speakers of minority languages.

Irony comprehension requires going beyond literal meaning of words and is challenging for children. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how teaching metapragmatic knowledge in classrooms impacts written irony comprehension in 10-year-old Finnish-speaking children (n = 41, 21 girls) compared to a control group (n = 34, 13 girls). At pre-test, children read ironic and literal sentences embedded in stories while their eye movements were recorded. Next, the training group was taught about irony, and the control group was taught about reading comprehension. At post-test, the reading task and eye-tracking were repeated. Irony comprehension improved after metapragmatic training on irony, suggesting that metapragmatic knowledge serves an important role in irony development. However, the eye movement data suggested that training did not change the strategy children used to resolve the ironic meaning. The results highlight the potential of metapragmatic training and have implications for theories of irony comprehension.

Despite the importance of cognitive development for vocabulary acquisition, limited attention has been given to the impacts of cognitive factors on this phenomenon from a longitudinal perspective. This study evaluates the longitudinal development of such factors (i.e. metacognitive knowledge, working memory, and non-verbal intelligence) and L2 vocabulary knowledge growth in 210 young second language learners enrolled in a bilingual programme in China. Results supported individual differences in the initial level and the growth rate of learners' cognitive development and vocabulary knowledge growth: a higher starting level of cognitive development correlated with a higher level of vocabulary knowledge and a faster rate of vocabulary knowledge growth. Findings revealed particularly significant predictive role of metacognitive knowledge on vocabulary knowledge, followed by non-verbal intelligence and working memory. Relevant implications were discussed based on the findings.

We explored whether bilingual toddlers make use of semantic and phonological overlap between their languages to learn new words. We analysed cross-sectional and longitudinal CDI data on the words understood and produced by 1.0 to 3.0-year-old bilingual toddlers with English and one additional language. Cognates were more likely to be understood and produced compared to non-cognates. Cognate effects were modulated by whether the toddler knew the translation equivalent in the other language, highlighting that young learners are sensitive to the similarities across their languages. Additionally, exploratory analyses suggest that children with smaller vocabularies rely more on translation equivalents to support the acquisition of difficult words. Children with larger vocabulary sizes exhibited no preference for translation equivalents in comprehension, and a preference for new concepts in production. The rapid acceleration of vocabulary growth in the second year of life may explain this developmental change in translation equivalent preference.

Words said aloud are typically recalled more than words studied under other techniques. In certain circumstances, production does not lead to this memory advantage. We investigated the nature of this effect by varying the task during learning. Children aged five to six years were trained on novel words which required no action (Heard) compared to Verbal-Speech (production), Non-Verbal-Speech (stick out tongue), and Non-Verbal-Non-Speech (touch nose). Eye-tracking showed successful learning of novel words in all training conditions, but no differences between conditions. Both non-verbal tasks disrupted recall, demonstrating that encoding can be disrupted when children perform different types of concurrent actions.