Journal of Child Language最新文献

During vocabulary instruction, it is important to teach words until their representations are robust enough to be retained. For adults, the number of training sessions a target item is successfully retrieved during training predicts the likelihood of post-training retention. To assess this relationship in children, we reanalyzed data from Gordon et al. (2021b, 2022). Four- to six-year-old children completed six training days with word form-object pairs and were tested one month later. Results indicate that the number of training sessions that a word form was retrieved was positively related to post-training retention. We discuss implications for vocabulary instruction and interventions.

Based on the linguistic analysis of game explanations and retellings, the paper's goal is to investigate the relation of preschool children's situated discourse competence and iconic gestures in different communicative genres, focussing on reinforcing and supplementary speech-gesture-combinations. To this end, a method was developed to evaluate discourse competence as a context-sensitive and interactively embedded phenomenon. The so-called GLOBE-model was adapted to assess discourse competence in relation to interactive scaffolding. The findings show clear links between the children's competence and their parents' scaffolding. We suggest this to be evidence of a fine-tuned interactive support system. The results also indicate strong relations between higher discourse competence and increased frequency of iconic gestures. This applies in particular to reinforcing gestures. The results are interpreted as a confirmation that the speech-gesture system undergoes systematic changes during early childhood, and that gesturing becomes more iconic - and thus more communicative - when discourse competence is growing.

We examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of lexical-tone and vowel-quality perception in learners of a non-tonal language. We tested 25 6- and 25 9-month-old German-learning infants, as well as 24 German adults and expected developmental differences for the two linguistic properties, as they are both carried by vowels, but have a different status in German. In adults, both lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts elicited mismatch negativities, with a stronger response to the vowel-quality contrast. Six-month-olds showed positive mismatch responses for lexical-tone and vowel-quality contrasts, with an emerging negative mismatch response for vowel-quality only. The negative mismatch responses became more pronounced for the vowel-quality contrast at 9 months, while the lexical-tone contrast elicited mainly positive mismatch responses. Our data reveal differential developmental changes in the processing of vowel properties that differ in their lexical relevance in the ambient language.

Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children’s perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measures of pronunciation distance. To address these gaps, 6- and 12-year-olds and adults ranked talkers’ perceived distance from the local accent (i.e., Midland American English). Rankings were compared with objective distance measures. Acoustic and phonetic distance measures were significant predictors of ladder rankings, but there was no evidence that children and adults significantly differed in their sensitivity to accent strength. Levenshtein Distance, a phonetic distance metric, was the strongest predictor of perceptual rankings for both children and adults. As a percept, accent strength has critical implications for social judgments, which determine real world social outcomes for talkers with non-local accents.

Many studies have explored children’s acquisition of temporal adverbs. However, the extent to which children’s early temporal language has discursive instead of solely temporal meanings has been largely ignored. We report two corpus-based studies that investigated temporal adverbs in Finnish child-parent interaction between the children’s ages of 1;7 and 4;11. Study 1 shows that the two corpus children used temporal adverbs to construe both temporal and discursive meanings from their early adverb production and that the children’s usage syntactically broadly reflected the input received. Study 2 shows that the discursive uses of adverbs appeared to be learned from contextually anchored caregiver constructions that convey discourse functions like urging and reassuring, and that the usage is related to the children’s and caregivers’ interactional roles. Our study adds to the literature on the acquisition of temporal adverbs by demonstrating that these items are learned also with additional discursive meanings in family interaction.

This study investigated differences in adult-child language interactions when parents and their three-to-four-year old children engage in wordless book reading, text-and-picture book reading and a small-world toy play activity. Twenty-two parents recorded themselves completing each activity at home with their child. Parent input was compared across contexts, focusing on interactive and conceptual domains: use of open prompts, expansions or extensions of children's utterances, and use of decontextualised (abstract) language. Use of linguistic expansions was greater during book reading than toy play. Parents used open questions and added contingent conceptual information more often when reading wordless books than in both other conditions. Findings suggest that wordless books may combine the benefits of open-endedness and linguistic content based around a narrative. Parents' use of abstract language also varied by condition. This study extends understanding of the role of activity context in shaping children's language learning environments.

This study compared a unidimensional model of vocabulary and a two-factor model comprising vocabulary breadth and depth in a second language (L2). A total of 167 Chinese Grade 4 and 5 primary school children (Mean_age = 9.96 years old) learning English as an L2 participated in this study, and they were tested on four English vocabulary tests. Our results of confirmatory factor analyses indicate that vocabulary breadth and depth were not two distinct dimensions, and the unidimensional model was supported. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

This research investigated the impact of the number of talkers with whom children engage in daily conversation on their language development. Two surveys were conducted in 2020, targeting two-year-olds growing up in Japanese monolingual families. Caregivers reported the number of talkers in three age groups and children's productive vocabulary via questionnaires. The results demonstrated significant effects of variability in talkers in fifth grade or above in Study 1 (N = 50; male = 23; r = .372) and in adult talkers in Study 2 (N = 175; non-nursery going; male = 76; r = .184) on children's vocabulary development, after controlling for language exposure time and demographic variables. Possible mediating factors are discussed. This research extends previous findings from immigrant bilingual children to monolingual speakers in Japan, suggesting the potential contribution of available talkers other than caregivers in conversational environments.

During the recent pandemic, it became necessary to adapt lab-based studies to online experiments. To investigate the impact of online testing on the quality of data, we focus on three paradigms widely used in infant research: a word recognition task using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, a word learning task using the Switch task, and a language assessment tool (WinG) where children identify a target word amongst a set of picture cards. Our results for synchronous and asynchronous studies provide support for the robustness of online testing. In Experiment 1, robust word recognition was found in 24-month-old toddlers. In Experiment 2, 17-month-old infants consistently learned a new word. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that 19- to 26-month-old children performed well on a language assessment test administered online. Overall, effect sizes or language scores were found to be higher than in lab-based studies. These experiments point to promising possibilities for reaching out to families around the world.

This study compared school-aged monolingual and bilingual English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in terms of understanding metaphors on recall, multiple-choice, and reasoning tasks. It also examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and understanding metaphors on different measures. A hundred and thirty Persian-Turkish early bilinguals and 122 monolingual Persian-speaking EFL learners took three different tests of metaphor comprehension and the Figural Intersections Test, a test of cognitive capacity. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in terms of cognitive capacity and understanding metaphors on two of the tasks, though with a small effect size. Furthermore, there was a significant positive relationship between cognitive capacity and the scores on the multiple-choice and reasoning tests, but not the recall test. Results suggest that bilingual L3 learners have an edge in understanding metaphors, reflecting a cognitive advantage.