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For children with normal hearing (NH), early communication skills predict vocabulary, a precursor to grammar. Growth in early communication skills of infants with cochlear implants (CIs) was investigated using the Early Communication Indicator (ECI), a play-based observation measure. Multilevel linear growth modelling on data from six ECI sessions held at three-monthly intervals revealed significant growth overall, with a non-significant slower growth rate than that of children with NH (comparison age centred at 18 months). Analyses of gesture use and of nonword vocalisations revealed the CI group used significantly more of each, with more rapid growth. In contrast, the CI group used significantly fewer single words and multiword utterances, and with slower growth. Maternal education and time to achieve consistent CI use impacted significantly on growth for the CI sample. The results indicate that progression to vocabulary by young CI users can be supported by encouraging their use of prelinguistic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evans & Levinson (E&L) argue against Universal Grammar on the basis of language diversity. A related and fundamental issue is whether the language input provides sufficient information for a child to acquire it. I briefly discuss the more integrated approaches to language acquisition which focus on the mechanisms, and research showing that input cues provide valuable information for the language learner. doi:10.1017/S0140525X09990616

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Levy and Eilam on speech impairment in children with neurodevelopmental disorders, one by Plesa Skwerer et al. on the social aspects of language in children with Williams syndrome and one by Rescorla and Sayfer on vocabulary development in children with autism spectrum disorders.

For sixty-seven children with ASD (age 1;6 to 5;11), mean Total Vocabulary score on the Language Development Survey (LDS) was 65·3 words; twenty-two children had no reported words; and twenty-one children had 1–49 words. When matched for vocabulary size, children with ASD and children in the LDS normative sample did not differ in semantic category or word-class scores. Q correlations were large when percentage use scores for the ASD sample were compared with those for samples of typically developing children as well as children with vocabularies <50 words. The 57 words with the highest percentage use scores for the ASD children were primarily nouns, represented a variety of semantic categories, and overlapped substantially with the words having highest percentage use scores in samples of typically developing children as well as children with lexicons of <50 words. Results indicated that the children with ASD were acquiring essentially the same words as typically developing children, suggesting delayed but not deviant lexical composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compared the receptive and expressive language profiles of verbally expressive children and adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS) and those with Fragile X syndrome (FXS) and examined the extent to which these profiles reliably differentiate the diagnostic groups. A total of twenty-four verbal participants with DS (mean age: 12 years), twenty-two verbal participants with FXS (mean age: 12 years), and twenty-seven participants with typical development (TD; mean age = 4 years) completed standardized measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary and grammar, as well as a conversational language sample. Study results indicate that there are distinct DS and FXS language profiles, which are characterized by differences in grammatical ability. The diagnostic groups were not differentiated based on vocabulary performance. This study supports the existence of unique language profiles associated with DS and FXS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Children's assignment of novel words to nameless objects, over objects whose names they know (mutual exclusivity; ME) has been described as a driving force for vocabulary acquisition. Despite their ability to use ME to fast-map words (Preissler & Carey, 2005), children with autism show impaired language acquisition. We aimed to address this puzzle by building on studies showing that correct referent selection using ME does not lead to word learning unless ostensive feedback is provided on the child's object choice (Horst & Samuelson, 2008). We found that although toddlers aged 2;0 at risk for autism can use ME to choose the correct referent of a word, they do not benefit from feedback for long-term retention of the word–object mapping. Further, their difficulty using feedback is associated with their smaller receptive vocabularies. We propose that difficulties learning from social feedback, not lexical principles, limits vocabulary building during development in children at risk for autism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examined the production of three types of noun plural inflections, feminine sound plural (FSP), masculine sound plural (MSP), and broken plural (BP) in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without language impairment. A total of thirty-six Kuwaiti participants – twelve adults, twelve children with specific language impairment (SLI), and twelve typically developing age-matched controls (TD) were presented with twenty-seven pictured stimuli of real and nonsense words. The results showed that the TD children were significantly more accurate in using the required noun plural inflections than the SLI group. The TD children's preferred overgeneralization strategy was to substitute FSP for the regular MSP and irregular BP contexts much more than their peers with SLI. The performance of the SLI group also differed from that of their age-matched counterparts in the number of errors and their distribution across categories. The results are discussed in the light of relevant theories of atypical language development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on language in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) has been fueled by persistent theoretical controversies for two decades. These shifted from initial focus on dissociations between language and cognition functions, to examining the paradox of socio-communicative impairments despite high sociability and relatively proficient expressive language. We investigated possible sources of communicative difficulties in WS in a collaborative referential communication game. Five- to thirteen-year-old children with WS were compared to verbal mental age- and to chronological age-matched typically developing children in their ability to consider different types of information to select a speaker's intended referent from an array of items. Significant group differences in attention deployment to object locations, and in the number and types of clarification requests, indicated the use of less efficient and less mature strategies for reference resolution in WS than expected based on mental age, despite learning effects similar to those of the comparison groups, shown as the game progressed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech? We explored this question, comparing eleven children with PL – matched to thirty TD children on expressive vocabulary – in the second year of life. Children with PL showed similarities to TD children for simple but not complex sentence types. Children with PL produced simple sentences across gesture and speech several months before producing them entirely in speech, exhibiting parallel delays in both gesture + speech and speech-alone. However, unlike TD children, children with PL produced complex sentence types first in speech-alone. Overall, the gesture–speech system appears to be a robust feature of language learning for simple – but not complex – sentence constructions, acting as a harbinger of change in language development even when that language is developing in an injured brain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in BSL, in comparison to a subset of children from Study 1 matched for age and BSL exposure. The two groups' results were comparable in most respects. However, the group with SLI made occasional word-finding errors and gave fewer responses in the first 15 seconds. We conclude that deaf children with SLI do not differ from their controls in terms of the semantic organization of the BSL lexicon, but that they access signs less efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical relations (e.g. between ‘is’ and ‘-ing’ in ‘she is happily singing’). In a head-turn experiment with infants aged 1;6, family risk and typically developing infants were exposed to one of two novel languages containing dependencies of the type a-X-c, b-X-d or a-X-d, b-X-c, with fixed first and third elements and twenty-four different X elements. During test, typically developing children listened longer to ungrammatical strings (i.e. that did not correspond to their training language). However, family-risk children did not discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical strings, indicating deficient implicit learning. The implications of these findings in relation to dyslexia and other language-based disorders are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is a naturalistic study of the development of language in Hebrew-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS) and children with Down syndrome (DS), whose MLU extended from 1·0 to 4·4. Developmental curves over the entire span of data collection revealed minor differences between children with WS, children with DS, and typically developing (TD) controls of similar MLU. Development within one calendar year showed remarkable synchrony among the variables. However, age of language onset and pace of acquisition departed significantly from normal timing. It is argued that in view of the centrality of genetic timing and the network properties of cognition, normal schedules are crucial determinants of intact development. Consequently, with respect to neurodevelopmental syndromes, the so-called ‘language delay’ is indicative of deviance that is likely to impact development in critical ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Children with Down syndrome typically have weaknesses in oral language, but it has been suggested that this domain may benefit from learning to read. Amongst oral language skills, vocabulary is a relative strength, although there is some evidence of difficulties in learning the phonological form of spoken words. This study investigated the effect of orthographic support on spoken word learning with seventeen children with Down syndrome aged seven to sixteen years and twenty-seven typically developing children aged five to seven years matched for reading ability. Ten spoken nonwords were paired with novel pictures; for half the nonwords the written form was also present. The spoken word learning of both groups did not differ and benefited to the same extent from the presence of the written word. This suggests that compared to reading-matched typically developing children, children with Down syndrome are not specifically impaired in phonological learning and benefit equally from orthographic support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3rd person singular with -t suffix) with either high- or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1–5;1), sixteen TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0–3;11). The findings revealed that children with SLI, but not CA- or VA-children, showed differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables, replicating the results from English-learning children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines potential predictors of 'precocious talking' (expressive language ⩾90th percentile) at one and two years of age, and of ' stability ' in precocious talking across both time periods, drawing on data from a prospective community cohort comprising over 1,800 children. Logistic regression was used to examine the relationship between precocious talking and the following potential predictors: gender, birth order, birth weight, non-English speaking background, socioeconomic status, maternal age, maternal mental health scores, and vocabulary and educational attainment of parents. The strongest predictors of precocity (being female and having a younger mother) warrant further exploration. Overall, however, it appears that precocity in early vocabulary development is not strongly influenced by the variables examined, which together explained just 2.6% and 1% of the variation at 1;0 and 2;0 respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an investigation of children's (aged 3;5-9;8) comprehension of sentences containing ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment. Results from a picture selection study (N=90) showed that children use verb semantics and preposition type to resolve the ambiguity, with older children also showing sensitivity to the definiteness of the object NP as a cue to interpretation. Study 2 investigated three- and five-year-old children's (N=47) ability to override an instrumental interpretation of ambiguous PPs in order to process attributes of the referential scene. The results showed that while five-year-olds are capable of incorporating aspects of the referential scene into their interpretations, three-year-olds are not as successful. Overall, the results suggest that children are attuned very early to the lexico-semantic co-occurrences that have been shown to aid ambiguity resolution in adults, but that more diffuse cues to interpretation are used only later in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on Michael Tomasello's review of Adele Goldberg's book 'Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure.' Implications of the study of child language development, particularly syntactic development; Acquisition data supporting the view that meaning is derived from constructions; Ways in which a child might come to know the constructions of his or her language.

Evans & Levinson (E&L) argue against Universal Grammar on the basis of language diversity. A related and fundamental issue is whether the language input provides sufficient information for a child to acquire it. I briefly discuss the more integrated approaches to language acquisition which focus on the mechanisms, and research showing that input cues provide valuable information for the language learner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the message of the co-editors of the "Journal of Child Language." The co-editors are excited with the challenges posed by the role. They acknowledged the contribution of Elena Lieven as editor of the journal. The list of the members of the support team of the co-editors are presented. The co-editors aimed to ensure that the high standard of the journal continues.