Search results for "Child Language"
showing 10 items of 24 documents
Information structure in language acquisition. Production and comprehension of (in)definite articles by German-speaking children.
2020
AbstractThe present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a “given better than new”-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.
Early language and behavioral regulation skills as predictors of social outcomes.
2012
Purpose In the present study, the authors examined the prospective associations among early language skills, behavioral regulation skills, and 2 aspects of school-age social functioning (adaptability and social skills). Method The study sample consisted of children with and without a familial risk for dyslexia. The authors analyzed the relations among children’s language (at age 2;6 [years;months] and age 5;0), behavioral regulation skills (at age 5;0), and social functioning (at age 8;0) using structural equation modeling. Subgroups of children with respect to language and behavioral regulation skills (at age 5;0) were identified through the use of mixture modeling. Results Among at-risk …
Audiovisual speech perception in children with developmental language disorder in degraded listening conditions.
2013
Purpose The effect of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the perception of audiovisual speech in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) was investigated by varying the noise level and the sound intensity of acoustic speech. The main hypotheses were that the McGurk effect (in which incongruent visual speech alters the auditory speech percept) would be weaker for children with DLD than for controls and that it would get stronger with decreasing SNR in both groups. Method The participants were 8-year-old children with DLD and a sample of children with normal language development. In the McGurk stimuli, the consonant uttered by the voice differed from that articulated …
Continuity of Communication and Language Development (M����tt�� et al., 2016)
2022
Purpose: This longitudinal study examined the development of prelinguistic skills and the continuity of communication and language from the prelinguistic stage to school age. Method: Prelinguistic communication of 427 Finnish children was followed repeatedly from 6 to 18 months of age (n = 203���322 at ages 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 months), and its associations with language ability at ages 2;0 (n = 104), 3;0 (n = 112), 4;7 (n = 253), 5;3 (n = 102), and 7;9 (n = 236) were examined using latent growth curve modeling. Results: Prelinguistic development across several skills emerged as a rather stable intraindividual characteristic during the first 2 years of life. Continuity from prelinguistic de…
Norwegian children's acquisition of the dialect feature r
2019
The pronunciation of r is a central dialect feature of Norwegian. The main division is between a front and a back pronunciation. The back realization is acquired relatively early (around age 4), while the front realization is one of the most problematic sounds to acquire, and substitution sounds are frequent. Using two data collection points, we show how four children learning Norwegian start by substituting r use of the r of their dialect area or idiolectal surroundings. The main argument of this article is that the r-development of kindergarten children is not only governed by rules on acquisition and development lines, but also by the sociolinguistic variation and use of r in the Norwegi…
The interaction of language and thought in children's language acquisition: a crosslinguistic study
1997
The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential interaction of conceptual representations and linguistic systems in the process of language acquisition. Language–thought interactions were studied in 80 American, 48 Finnish and 48 Polish preschool children. The research focused on the conceptual and linguistic development of space and time. The spatial and temporal conceptual tasks were designed to measure the transition from experiential to inferential knowledge of space/time representations. In the linguistic domain, comprehension and production tests were used to evaluate the children's capacity to understand mono- and bi-referential location in space and time, where mono-re…
The play and language behavior of mothers with and without dyslexia and its association to their toddlers' language development.
2004
The play and language behavior of mothers with ( n = 49) and without ( n = 49) specific reading disabilities (RD) was investigated during play with their 14-month-old children. The contribution of maternal behavior to the language development of their children was examined. The children's receptive and expressive language skills were assessed longitudinally at 14, 18, and 30 months, using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories and the Reynell Developmental Language Scales. Children with and without familial risk for RD did not differ from each other in any play or language measures at these ages. No group differences were found for mothers' manifestations of nonsymbolic play a…
LATGALIAN COMPONENT IN THE LEARNING OF LATVIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE: FROM PRESCHOOL TO SECONDARY SCHOOL (1990–2015)
2017
The conditions of language development and preservation are the quality of its acquisition in the early childhood, in-depth usage and study in the educational process and formation of positive and responsible attitude towards language and national literary heritage. The quality of the development of child’s Latvian language is determined by several environmental factors: the language environment in the family, the language environment in preschool, basic and secondary educational institutions and the language environment in public space. In Latgale most children learn Latvian in heterogeneous sociolinguistic environment. Child’s acquisition of the Latvian language in the family occurs in on…
MLU and IPSyn measuring absolute complexity
2009
This article compares the results of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) with the structural complexity of spontaneous utterances produced by 30-month-old Finnish children in a semi-structured playing situation. The comparison was carried out in order to determine the aspects of structural complexity which can be detected with MLU and IPSyn. This research adopts the frameworks of absolute complexity together with a multidimensional view of utterance structure and, furthermore, applies it through Utterance Analysis (UA). The results of the comparison between the metrics and changes in structural complexity discovered by UA reveal that MLU and IPSyn do functi…
The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.
2007
International audience; The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically…