Journal of child language
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Journal of child language · May 2021
Code-switching in parents' everyday speech to bilingual infants.
Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents' code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French-English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. ⋯ The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant's understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual language acquisition.
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Journal of child language · Mar 2012
Second-first language acquisition: analysis of expressive language skills in a sample of girls adopted from China.
In this study we investigated adopted Chinese girls' expressive English language outcomes in relation to their age at adoption, chronological age, length of exposure to English and developmental risk status at the time of adoption. Vocabulary and phrase utterance data on 318 girls were collected from the adoptive mothers using the Language Development Survey (LDS) (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000). The girls, aged 18-35 months (M=26·2 months, SD=4·9 months), were adopted at ages ranging from 6·8 to 24 months (M=12·6 months, SD=3·1 months), and had been exposed to English for periods ranging from 1·6 to 27·6 months (M=13·7, SD=5·7). ⋯ The gap between their expressive language and that of same-age girls from the US normative sample was wider for children aged 18-23 months but was closed for children aged 30-35 months. About 16% of the children met the LDS criteria for delays in vocabulary and 17% met the LDS criteria for delays in mean length of phrase. Speech/language interventions were received by 33·3% of the children with delays in vocabulary and 25% with delays in phrase.
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Journal of child language · Aug 2006
I'm sorry I said that: apologies in young children's discourse.
We examined children's use of apology terms in parent-child discourse. Longitudinal data from 9 children (5 males, 4 females) between the ages of 1;2 and 6;1 were analysed. Before 2;0, the use of apology terms was rare. ⋯ With age children's apologies also became more elaborate. Children were exposed to apology terms primarily through apologies directed to them and, to a lesser degree, in talk about apologies. Our study documents young children's early mastery of an important pragmatic skill and identifies parents' role in its acquisition.
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Journal of child language · Jun 1993
Phonological and morphological analysis skills in young children.
Twenty-two normally developing five-year-olds were asked to judge, identify, repair and explain phonological and morphological errors. All of the errors involved the addition, substitution or omission of a single phoneme, which in the morphological task, was also an inflectional morpheme. ⋯ Children performed significantly better on the phonological task than on the morphological task. It is proposed that the results are due to differences in the type and location of linguistic information to be analysed and to differences in memory demands in the tasks.
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Nursery rhymes are an almost universal part of young English-speaking children's lives. We have already established that there are strong links between children's early knowledge of nursery rhymes at 3;3 and their developing phonological skills over the next year and a quarter. Since such skills are known to be related to children's success in learning to read, this result suggests the hypothesis that acquaintance with nursery rhymes might also affect children's reading. ⋯ This paper presents further analyses which support the idea of this path from nursery rhymes to reading. Nursery rhymes are related to the child's subsequent sensitivity to rhyme and phonemes. Moreover the connection between knowledge of nursery rhymes and reading and spelling ability disappears when controls are made for differences in these subsequent phonological skills.