First Language

This study focuses on the acquisition of typologically distinct inflection in the polysynthetic language Northern East Cree: ‘relational’morphology, which adds a third-person participant to the verb and increases semantic but not syntactic valence. Two studies examine naturalistic video recordings involving one adult and one child (age 3;08–5;11), evaluating predictions for the acquisition of relational inflection based on considerations of frequency and complexity. Study 1 traces the distributional characteristics of two major inflectional patterns within child-directed speech, and Study 2 describes Daisy’s acquisition of both major inflectional patterns. Although important facets of Daisy’s productions can be predicted by looking toward either frequency or complexity, complexity more clearly predicts her persistent overgeneralizations. These findings have implications for the science of language acquisition, where languages such as Cree and unique patterns such as relational inflection are underrepresented, as well as communities working to promote and strengthen their language.

Assessment of young children’s language skills is essential for monitoring development and informing early intervention. However, widely used assessment instruments are often developed for monolingual English-speaking contexts and may not align with children’s linguistic environments in multilingual settings. This feasibility study examined the adaptation of the Bayley-4 Language Scale (Bayley & Aylward, 2019) for Indonesian–Sasak toddlers using an iterative framework integrating linguistic, cultural, and psychometric evaluation. Rasch modelling supported the internal coherence of both receptive and expressive communication subtests while identifying a small number of statistically misfitting items. Subsequent linguistic and cultural analyses indicated that these items were often associated with English-specific grammatical constructions, culturally unfamiliar visual stimuli, or variability in caregiver-reported behaviours. Item-level analyses further showed how language variation between Indonesian and Sasak, together with local communicative routines, shaped response patterns and developmental ordering. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating item feasibility when adapting standardised language assessments to bilingual contexts. Building on this analysis, the study proposes an iterative, feasibility-based adaptation framework that integrates linguistic analysis, cultural review, and psychometric evidence to guide context-sensitive assessment refinement in bilingual settings, with broader methodological relevance for future work in multilingual environments.

This article focuses on the early acquisition of fricative and affricate consonants in Setswana, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana and South Africa (Tswana S30). We describe a series of intriguing patterns displayed in the speech of Setswana-learning children between the ages of 1 and 3 years. The data display clear trends also expected from the larger literature on phonological and phonetic development, including the stopping, affrication and debuccalization of target fricatives |s, ʃ, f, χ|, and the simplification (deaffrication; deaspiration) of target affricates |tɫ, tɫʰ, ʦ, ʦʰ, ʧ, ʧʰ, ʤ|. Beyond these general trends, the data reveal intriguing asymmetries: (a) the fact that coronal fricatives |s/ʃ| display much less debuccalization to laryngeals than the non-coronal fricatives |f, χ|; (b) the observation that while the non-lateral affricates |ʦ, ʦʰ, tʃ, ʧʰ, ʤ| are generally produced with their target place of articulation, the lateral affricates |tɫ, tɫʰ| can be variably substituted for velar stops [k, kʰ] instead. We first discuss why an analysis of the observations stated above transcends traditional models of phonology based on phonological features. We then argue that, in addition to phonological conditioning, issues in speech phonetics may also influence how children analyze the speech forms of their language. Our analyses reconcile the data with phonological theory, also in ways that offer additional insight on the origins of speech sound substitutions in child language.

Self-repetition is a critical linguistic process in language acquisition, aiding developmental and pragmatic functions. While typically developing children use self-repetition to reinforce understanding and organise discourse, its persistence in school-age children with a late-talking history remains underexplored beyond early childhood. This study examines whether 5-year-old children with a history of late talking continue to exhibit elevated self-repetition in naturalistic conversations and how self-repetition correlates with response complexity. Using the Clinical English Ellis Weismer Corpus, this study analysed spontaneous speech samples from 73 children (36 with a history of late talking, 37 typically developing) aged 5 years and 6 months. Self-repetition was categorised into syllable, word, and phrase types, with comparisons across groups and genders. Additionally, response structures were examined to determine how self-repetition interacts with verbal output and repetition measures. Results showed that children with a history of late talking exhibited significantly higher self-repetition rates, particularly at the syllable level. Gender differences were found, with males with a history of late talking displaying more frequent self-repetition. Lexical analysis indicated that both children with a history of late talking and typically developing children showed balanced noun–verb use in repetitive contexts. Both groups frequently used function words (e.g. pronouns, conjunctions, and adverbs) in repetitive contexts. Additionally, children with a history of late talking produced simpler, incomplete responses, whereas typically developing children displayed greater syntactic diversity. Correlation analysis revealed a negative relationship between self-repetition and response complexity in children with a history of late talking, suggesting that self-repetition may serve as a compensatory mechanism for linguistic deficits. These findings suggest a potential persistent compensatory role for self-repetition in children with a history of late talking, underscoring the need for interventions targeting lexical and syntactic growth to enhance communicative competence.

Personal narratives, stories about past personal experiences, are closely associated with social, academic, and mental health outcomes. Despite their importance, few validated assessment tools are available for Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) to assess personal narrative abilities. To address this gap, the Global Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories (TALES) Network developed a standardized protocol designed to support cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparisons. This study examines the feasibility of the Global TALES protocol for eliciting personal narratives from Canadian predominantly English- and French-speaking children and compares their narrative performance across four components of discourse processing derived from the Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA) framework: linguistic, propositional, macrostructure planning, and pragmatic. Using the French or English version of the Global TALES protocol, personal narratives from 40 typically developing children aged 9 to 10 years were collected: 20 English speaking and 20 French speaking. Narrative measures included verbal productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity at the linguistic level; local coherence at the propositional level; context and chronology at the macrostructure planning level; and narrative topics and theme at the pragmatic level. The Global TALES protocol successfully elicited personal narratives across both language groups (70%–100% across the 6 prompts), and no significant differences were found between groups across all 4 discourse components of the LUNA framework, with inter-rater reliability ranging from 72.5% to 94.3%. These findings support the promise of the Global TALES protocol as a clinically relevant tool for SLPs wanting to assess personal narrative skills, alongside a comprehensive framework, while allowing for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons.

Child language development unfolds in a piecemeal manner and according to usage patterns. This study tests whether a novel measure of usage that tracks changes in words’ contexts of use during childhood also coincides with piecemeal developmental changes. More specifically, this study examines whether developmental changes in thirty 5- to 15-year-old Spanish-speaking children’s Spanish /b/-initial word pronunciations progress according to how /b/-initial words’ frequency of use in contexts conditioning /b/ spirantization shift during childhood. A Bayesian mixed-effects linear regression provides evidence that /b/-initial words’ trajectories of reduction are guided by words’ shifting frequency of use in contexts conditioning spirantization. These findings indicate that changes in contextualized usage patterns align with changes in children’s lexical representations.

This study investigated the comprehension of relative clauses in Chinese children (aged 6 years 10 months to 12 years 11 months) with developmental dyslexia and/or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and explored associations between relative clause comprehension and various linguistic and cognitive factors to enhance our understanding of syntactic processing in these populations. Twenty-two children with dyslexia, 30 with ADHD, 29 with comorbid dyslexia and ADHD, and 31 chronological age-matched typically developing (TD) controls completed a relative clause comprehension task (measuring both accuracy and response latency) and a battery of tasks assessing linguistic and cognitive abilities. All clinical groups showed more accurate performance on subject relative clauses (SRCs) than object relative clauses (ORCs). Children with dyslexia and those with comorbid dyslexia and ADHD did not differ significantly in accuracy or response latency on either SRCs or ORCs. Moreover, they demonstrated significantly lower ORC accuracy than TD controls, with the comorbid group additionally demonstrating longer SRC response latencies than TD controls. Children with ADHD also exhibited much slower response latency than TD controls, particularly for SRCs. Additionally, morphological awareness predicted relative clause comprehension across the clinical groups, whereas better verbal working memory predicted slower processing in ADHD but faster processing in the comorbid group. The observed SRC advantage aligns with the prediction of featural Relativized Minimality, where structural intervention (i.e. syntactic blocking by an intervening element) critically affects children’s relative clause comprehension. The findings confirm the presence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and reveal novel evidence of syntactic challenges in ADHD. Morphological awareness and verbal working memory appear to play significant roles in sentence comprehension, highlighting their importance in clinical populations.

This paper presents an experiment on the comprehension of the negative indefinite pronoun nessuno (‘no one’) in different syntactic structures in Italian children aged 4 to 6. Specifically, the study aimed at determining when the meaning of nessuno is acquired, as well as whether negative concord structures showing both the sentential negation non (‘not’) and postverbal nessuno (e.g., ‘Non l’ha vinto nessuno’, lit. ‘Not it has won no one’) are easier to compute and, therefore, acquired earlier than structures displaying only preverbal nessuno (e.g., ‘Nessuno l’ha vinto’, lit. ‘No one it has won’) – a prediction following from a decomposition analysis of negative indefinites coupled with the Transparency Principle. Forty Italian-speaking children completed a Truth Value Judgement Task from which it emerged that the comprehension of nessuno is already almost at ceiling at 4 years of age, and that no difference in accuracy rates holds between pre- and postverbal nessuno. Although these findings neither support nor refute our predictions – that is, that the more linguistic material realised, the easier the comprehension – they are particularly interesting as they provide evidence for an early acquisition of nessuno regardless of the syntactic context. This, in turn, corroborates the idea that the late mastery of the double negation reading of certain Italian sentences featuring a preverbal negative indefinite followed by the sentential negative marker non is not to be attributed to difficulties in the processing of the negative information conveyed by the indefinite itself. Rather, it is more likely due to the processing of double negation requiring increased working memory resources and involving the detection and integration of both pragmatic and prosodic cues.

This paper provides an overview of morphological and syntactic means of relating events in narratives in Mano, a Mande language of West Africa. For this study, we collected a corpus containing retellings in Mano of an animated movie, “Kirikou et la sorcière,” as well as other narratives, mostly folktales, told by children and adults. Overall, a linear mixed-effect model revealed a statistically significant effect of text type and age, with increased predicted values of entropy in free narratives as well as in older speakers. We explored the following aspects: narrative chains, connectivity, and hierarchical organization. We compared texts based on the narrator’s age and the narrative type (narrative retelling vs. free narratives). Both factors played a role for various aspects of narrative organization. There were very few developmental or genre differences in the use of main tense forms used in the narrative chain. By contrast, connecting devices and means of hierarchical organization were used more and were more varied in older children and adults. Hierarchical organization was also more developed in free narratives than in Kirikou retellings but means of expressing connectivity were more diverse in Kirikou retellings than in free narratives.

Bilingualism has multiple benefits, however, non-native English speakers in the United States often lose their minority language. Nevertheless, language attrition is preventable, as parental perceptions of bilingualism (PoB) contribute to a child’s active use of each language and influence proficiency. At present, there is a significant gap in understanding how different cultures and belief systems might influence the language development of autistic children from bilingual Latino families. Furthermore, research on PoB among parents of autistic children has mainly been qualitative in nature. The purpose of this study was to (a) employ a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to develop a culturally and linguistically appropriate scale for both Latino autistic and non-autistic populations to quantify parental PoB and (b) to assess the psychometric properties of the scale. The study used a cross-sectional mixed-methods approach comprised of two separate stages. The first stage followed a qualitative and CBPR framework to develop the scale, and the second stage involved psychometric testing to assess construct validity and reliability of the scale. Results from stage 1 yielded significant revisions to the scale, particularly highlighting the relationship between bilingualism and its emotional value. Results from stage 2 suggested that the revised scale possessed good internal consistency (α = .93). Exploratory Factor Analysis identified a three-factor structure explaining 71.86% of the variance: General PoB (54.78%), Cultural and Emotional Benefits (10.05%), and Value of Bilingualism in the United States (7.03%). The scale demonstrated high internal consistency (α = .93). The Bilingualism Reflections: Assessment of Values and Opinions scale provides a valid, reliable, and culturally sensitive measure of parental PoB, addressing significant gaps in bilingualism research among autistic Latino populations. The findings underscore the importance of stakeholder involvement and offer clinicians and educators valuable insights to support bilingual development strategies tailored to culturally diverse autistic children and their families.

Studies of early lexical development have examined children’s vocabulary composition with the aim of quantifying early preference in the acquisition of nouns, predicates (verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), and closed-class/function words. Their findings show that a noun bias is common, suggesting it could be a universal aspect of early language development. However, only a small percentage of the world’s languages have been investigated. This paper examines whether children acquiring Xitsonga, a Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa, exhibit a noun bias in their early acquisition of lexical items. Data were collected from caregivers of 95 monolingual Xitsonga-speaking children aged 16 to 32 months in Limpopo Province, South Africa, using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) adapted for Xitsonga. Xitsonga-speaking children’s vocabularies showed a positive noun bias in relation to predicates and function words, similar to findings for most languages. However, separating predicates into verbs and adjectives showed that while there is still an early noun bias, children begin to favour verbs when their vocabularies exceed 400 words. The proportion of nouns and verbs aligns with findings for other Bantu languages, suggesting that languages that share typological similarities may have similar trajectories in early acquisition of lexical categories.

In Norway, it is common for children to switch between their local dialect and a Central Eastern Norwegian variety in role-play to signal role characters. This article examines how the use of Central Eastern Norwegian variants in the role-play register develops across 11 Southwestern Norwegian children and in individual children. The group-level analysis shows generally positive age-related trends, with significant increases for two properties—the present tense of be and what—indicating development beyond random variation. However, the use of Central Eastern Norwegian variants varies considerably across participants, and only a minority of the children employ Central Eastern Norwegian frequently. Individual analyses of the two children who use Central Eastern Norwegian the most reveal few significant effects and a mix of marginally positive and negative trends. Changes in play behaviour over time, including reduced in-character speech, may have affected children’s opportunities to use Central Eastern Norwegian within role-play. Patterns across play sessions raise the possibility that children’s engagement in particular play scenarios could be relevant for understanding the developmental patterns observed. Taken together, the results show that bidialectal competence and register acquisition are closely intertwined in children’s language development.

Previous studies of children’s comprehension of the presupposition of English again and its Mandarin equivalent you (requiring that an event of the same kind previously took place) have reported successful acquisition by preschool age. Such studies have generally used tasks that require children to make binary judgments (e.g. “true”/ “false”, “yes”/“no”). However, sentences involving presupposition failure are not necessarily judged as “false” by adults, making such tasks less than optimal for assessing children’s knowledge of presuppositions. In this study, we examine Mandarin-acquiring children’s comprehension of the presupposition of you ‘again’, using two alternative tasks that target the presupposition without requiring participants to make binary judgments about sentences involving presupposition failure. In the Question-Answer Task (Experiment 1), participants listened to stories and answered a wh-question after each story. The results revealed that most children responded as though they ignored the presupposition trigger you, which highlights the methodological challenge of investigating children’s knowledge of presupposition. We then conducted a Felicity Judgment Task (Experiment 2), which highlighted the presence of the trigger by asking participants to decide which of two speakers—one who produced you and one who did not—answered better. In this task, children displayed sensitivity to the presupposition of you, albeit not at adult-like levels. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to children’s knowledge of you and its obligatory presence when its presupposition is satisfied, a potential ambiguity in its interpretation, and possible differences between children and adults in how they project presuppositions from wh-questions.

Drawing on community-based speech data representing Canadian English, this study operationalizes a number of structural measures to track the evolution of relative clause constructions (RCCs) in the speech of 4 to 12-year-old children, effecting additional comparisons with a commensurate adult baseline variety. Embedded in a comparative sociolinguistic framework, quantitative analyses reveal the structural diversity of RCCs in the speech of children and adults, belying any expectation that vernacular RCCs adhere closely to the ‘prototype’ constructions that figure prominently in the experimental literature. Constructional parallels in the RCCs produced by older children and adults are interpreted as evidence of children’s attunement to distributional regularities and frequency effects in the community-based speech to which they are exposed, whereas structural discontinuities between those groups confirm that the acquisition of RCCs is developmentally protracted. Key findings of the study indicate that systematic quantitative analysis of community-based speech data can leverage new insights into the structural expansion of RCCs in middle to later childhood and suggest that children’s sensitivity to particular constructional preferences in ambient adult speech shapes their acquisition of English RCCs.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the frequency and diversity of metacognitive and metalinguistic verbs (MCVs, MLVs) in the spoken language of Palestinian Arabic-speaking adolescents through narrative retelling and critical thinking tasks. An additional goal was to examine associations between the use of these verbs and syntactic complexity, macrostructure, and critical thinking. Forty-two seventh-grade students retold two fables and responded to critical thinking questions during individual interviews with an adult examiner. Transcripts were analyzed for the frequency and diversity of MCVs (e.g. think, know, believe) and MLVs (e.g. say, tell, explain), as well as for syntactic complexity, macrostructure, and critical thinking. Analyses included both frequentist and Bayesian approaches, allowing evaluation of evidence for both the presence and absence of associations. The critical thinking task elicited a higher frequency and greater diversity of MCVs than narrative retelling, whereas narrative retelling elicited a higher frequency and greater diversity of MLVs. Bayesian analyses provided decisive evidence for these task effects. Correlational findings were more selective: clausal density showed an uncorrected association with narrative MCV frequency proportion, whereas Bayesian evidence suggested moderate support for null associations with macrostructure and mean length of communication unit. Overall, adolescents’ use of MCVs and MLVs appears to be selectively recruited by task demands, with weaker and more context-dependent links to broader discourse and critical thinking measures.

Baby sign programs aim to support communication between parents and preverbal infants by pairing signs with spoken words. This study addresses a notable gap in the literature by evaluating the large-scale impact of baby sign on both lexical development and caregiver behavior. Using an online questionnaire in 1348 typically developing, French hearing children (50% female) aged 10 to 28 months, 723 children exposed to baby sign at home were compared with 625 non-exposed peers. After controlling for socioeconomic status and parent–child activities, results revealed weak to no effect of baby sign on vocabulary development or caregiver behavior. These findings suggest that while baby sign is not detrimental to vocabulary development, it does not enhance spoken vocabulary as often claimed.

This study investigated how Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) comprehend focus using various cues. Participants included 21 CI children, 21 ASD children, 21 age- and gender-matched typically developing (TD) children aged 6 to 8, and 30 hearing adults. In a sentence-picture verification task, participants listened to simple subject–verb–object sentences paired with pictures, in which focus was indicated by canonical word order, prosody, the focus particle shì, or discourse context. They judged whether sentences matched pictures and corrected mismatched subjects or objects. Results showed that for adults, word order and context served as dominant cues for focus comprehension, while prosody and focus particle were less effective. TD children aged 6 to 8 demonstrated adult-like use of these dominant cues, while their independent use of secondary cues remained immature. CI children with comparable perceptual and language abilities showed patterns similar to their TD peers. In contrast, ASD children with comparable abilities did not use canonical word order effectively, correcting subjects and objects at chance level. Moreover, they displayed a relative preference for subject positions, resulting in a significant bias toward subject corrections in subject-focus contexts and in shì-marked conditions. These findings highlight the language-specific cue weighting in Mandarin and the distinct focus comprehension profiles of CI and ASD children.

Africa contains over one quarter of the languages currently used on the planet. The languages and the contexts in which they are used are diverse and therefore have much to teach us about language acquisition. However, African languages are chronically underrepresented in the language acquisition literature. This special issue of First Language contains 13 papers reporting new research findings on African languages, including studies investigating child-directed speech, phonological, prosodic, vocabulary, and morphosyntactic development, the development of narrative competence, and language assessment. In this introduction, we explain the motivation for the special issue, review past research on the acquisition of African languages, and introduce each of the 13 papers.

This study investigated how Spanish-speaking children interpret events when confronted with evidential and epistemic markers. Seventy-two children aged four, six, and eight completed a narrative comprehension task involving three conditions: sincerity (linguistic and visual information aligned), trickery (conflicting information), and blind (linguistic information only). Results revealed clear age-related differences in interpretation. Four-year-olds showed higher accuracy with expressions of subjective certainty, whereas 6- and 8-year-olds were more accurate when evidential markers explicitly indicated the source of information, particularly in the blind condition. These findings point to an age-related shift from reliance on subjective certainty to greater sensitivity to source-based linguistic cues, even in a language such as Spanish that lacks grammaticalised evidentiality.

Presupposition, the linguistic act of treating information as mutually shared or taken for granted, is a cornerstone of effective social interaction. To examine how this competence emerges in early childhood, the present study adopted a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of peer-to-peer conversations among 80 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers (aged 3–6). Quantitatively, the results revealed a clear developmental trajectory shaped by cognitive constraints. Statistic analysis indicated significant age-related growth in frequency of presupposition usage. Notably, children across all age groups showed a robust preference for “restricted structures” (e.g., definite descriptions) over verbal or clausal triggers. Qualitatively, the analysis identified four key developmental characteristics: (a) a default, usage-based deployment of triggers reflecting emergent linguistic competence; (b) the strategic use of shared knowledge as a conversational initiator; (c) the employment of elliptical responses as “communicative economizers”; and (d) the creative use of novel responses to manipulate shared assumptions for intentional goals. These findings support an emergentist framework, suggesting that presuppositional competence arises from the dynamic interplay of cognitive maturation and social exposure. The study concludes by outlining a theoretical model of presupposition development, offering new insights into how children navigate presupposition meaning in naturalistic peer interactions.