Child Language Data Exchange System Research Articles

Frequency of Hebrew word usage by children with intellectual and developmental disabilities: implications for AAC core vocabulary

Appropriate vocabulary selection for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention is crucial to support communication and language development in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Core vocabulary lists are commonly used to guide this process, and there is a need for language-specific consideration. This paper aimed to develop a wordlist for selecting the core vocabulary for AAC intervention for young Hebrew-speaking children with IDD. Five children (age 3;5–8;4) were audio-recorded in naturalistic interactions with an interviewer and family members. Using Levy’s clinical corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) and Child Phonology Analyzer (CPA) tools and preestablished codes, wordlists with usage frequencies were extracted and coded for lexeme, lexical categories and functions or content. The percentages of the 20, 50, 100, and 200 most frequent lexemes were calculated for each child and for the five children combined. The top 200 most frequently used lexemes constituted 85% of the composite lexicon. A comparison was made between this study list and a previous list derived from language samples of typically developing (TD). Lexemes representing function words dominated, albeit with a slight preference for content words in children with IDD. Among the content words, children with IDD used more adverbs, while children with TD used more verbs. Implications for AAC core vocabulary are discussed.

Input effects and unidirectional transfer in Mandarin–English heritage bilingual children: The case of spatial prepositional zai-phrases

Aims and objectives: This study investigates the effects of fine-grained aspects of input and cross-linguistic influence on the placement of prepositional zai-phrase ( zai-PP) in heritage Mandarin. Methodology: Utterances with zai-PPs were extracted from transcripts of an elicited narration task administered with child heritage speakers of Mandarin ( n = 27, aged 4–14) and their parents ( n = 18) in the United Kingdom, and compared with those produced by child and adult Mandarin speakers in Beijing in a similar narration task, selected from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Data and analysis: The zai-PPs were coded for pre/postverbal placement and event semantics of co-occurring verbs, as well as innovative uses. Comparisons were made between groups of participants, and correlations were performed among child and input variables. Findings: In Mandarin, the heritage children overused postverbal zai-PPs across measures and comparisons, producing innovative uses of postverbal zai-PPs not found in the input or Beijing baselines. Their production of preverbal zai-PPs increases with age (proxy for cumulative amount of input) rather than structural frequency in their parental input. In English, they correctly placed spatial PPs postverbally. Our findings revealed protracted development of zai-PP placement in heritage Mandarin due to inherent complexity of the structure, reduction of input in the heritage language at school age, and strong unidirectional transfer from English to Mandarin. Originality: This study is among the first to understand a heritage structure by analysing speech samples of both heritage children and their parents and examine input–outcome relations between them directly. Significance: The placement of zai-PP in relation to individual verbs with different event semantics is subject to protracted development and vulnerable to majority language influence in heritage language acquisition, but further development at the school age is likely, if sufficient amounts of input are provided.

Text mining and sentiment analysis: A new lens to explore the emotion dynamics of mother‐child interactions

AbstractEmotions are highly dynamic and social in nature. Traditional approaches to studying emotion expression face obstacles such as substantial time investments, susceptibility to human biases, and limited capacity to capture nuanced emotional patterns. To address these challenges, this research leveraged text mining and sentiment analysis to explore the dynamic patterns of emotion expression within the context of mother‐child interactions. We analyzed 8,841 conversation transcripts involving 1,462 mother‐child dyads, sourced from the Child Language Data Exchange System. Polarity scores were calculated and analyzed to uncover the temporal patterns of mother and child emotional sentiment. Our findings revealed that mothers tended to exhibit heightened levels of positive emotion at the beginning and conclusion of conversations, whereas children displayed a more linear positive trend. Using model‐based cluster analysis, we identified two distinct clusters of mothers characterized by varying degrees of emotion expression variation and two clusters of children showing different rates of elevation in positive emotion. At the dyadic level, the differences between mother and child polarity scores varied as a function of time, with an increase of difference from the beginning to the 20th percentile point, a decrease until the 90th percentile, and then an increase again towards the end of the conversation. This study demonstrates the utility of text mining and sentiment analysis in developmental studies, particularly in the context of parent‐child interactions. The findings hold informative implications for interventions that focus on fostering healthy parent‐child relationships.

On the L1-acquisition of the pragmatics of discourse like

Abstract This study analyzes the L1-acquisition of discourse like and its pragmatic functions in American English based on the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development component of the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The data show that discourse like is already present in the speech of 3- and 4-year-old children and that even very young children employ like to perform distinct pragmatic functions with specifying uses being dominant until age 8;5. The analysis also shows a notable increase in discourse like as children mature, mainly driven by an increase in attention-directing like, the dominant function of discourse like among children older than 8;5. Conditional inference trees show that the use of discourse like by children is affected by a child’s age, the situation type and the frequency of discourse like in caregivers’ input. Children younger than 7;10 use discourse like only rarely in formal contexts as well as in informal contexts if their caregivers do not use discourse like frequently. However, children use discourse like substantially more if they are older than 7;10 or, in informal contexts, when their caregivers use discourse like frequently. The changes in frequency and the functional shifts in the use of like around the ages of 7 to 9 is interpreted to show that peers become more important as linguistic role models when children enter school. The results thus substantiate research which suggests that the pragmatic and social meanings of discourse markers are learned alongside linguistic constraints rather than after the form has been acquired.

Frequency of word usage by Hebrew preschoolers: implications for AAC core vocabulary

This study’s goal was to inform the selection of the most frequently used words to serve as a reference for core vocabulary selection for Hebrew-speaking children who require AAC. The paper describes the vocabulary used by 12 Hebrew-speaking preschool children with typical development in two different conditions: peer talk, and peer talk with adult mediation. Language samples were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) tools to identify the most frequently used words. The top 200 lexemes (all variations of a single word) in the peer talk and adult-mediated peer talk conditions accounted for 87.15% (n = 5008 tokens) and 86.4% (n = 5331 tokens) of the total tokens produced in each language sample (n = 5746, n = 6168), respectively. A substantially overlapping vocabulary of 337 lexemes accounted for up to 87% (n = 10411) of the tokens produced in the composite list (n = 11914). The results indicate that a relatively small set of words represent a large proportion of the words used by the preschoolers across two different conditions. General versus language-specific implications for core vocabulary selection for children in need of AAC devices are discussed.

Optimality Theory and the Development of Do-Support in Children’s Wh-Questions

This study aims to explore where-, how-, and why-questions produced by young L1 English-speaking children and to account for how children develop wh-questions within Optimality Theory (OT). For this purpose, the data have been collected from the Child Language Data Exchange System database. The analysis showed that where-questions were produced earlier than how- and why-questions and that early where-questions tended to fail subject-auxiliary inversion in the early stages. Another finding is that children produced howquestions with subject-auxiliary inversion even when howquestions started to be attested. To account for the developmental differences observed in the data, I propose an OT analysis. This study shows the applicability of OT to syntactic language development and demonstrates that OT provides a unified account of the development of wh-questions by reranking the same constraint set. Moreover, a developmental difference shown in wh-phrases can also be accounted for by assuming that the constraint, Operator in Specifier (OP-SPEC), can be divided into sub-constraints.

Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children's emotion vocabulary.

Learning about emotions is an important part of children's social and communicative development. How does children's emotion-related vocabulary emerge over development? How may emotion-related information in caregiver input support learning of emotion labels and other emotion-related words? This investigation examined language production and input among English-speaking toddlers (16-30 months) using two datasets: Wordbank (N=5520; 36% female, 38% male, and 26% unknown gender; 1% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic, 40% White, 2% others, and 50% unknown ethnicity; collected in North America; dates of data collection unknown) and Child Language Data Exchange System (N=587; 46% female, 44% male, 9% unknown gender, all unknown ethnicity; collected in North America and the UK; data collection dates, were available between 1962 and 2009). First, we show that toddlers develop the vocabulary to express increasingly wide ranges of emotional information during the first 2 years of life. Computational measures of word valence showed that emotion labels are embedded in a rich network of words with related valence. Second, we show that caregivers leverage these semantic connections in ways that may scaffold children's learning of emotion and mental state labels. This research suggests that young children use the dynamics of language input to construct emotion word meanings, and provides new techniques for defining the quality of infant-directed speech.

Early grammar-building in French-speaking deaf children with cochlear implants: A follow-up corpus study.

One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can be generalized to other languages. In particular, little is known about languages known for their grammatical complexity, such as French. The aim of this corpus study was to compare the productive use of function words (FWs) and some agreement features (AGRs) in children with CIs and children with typical development (TD) matched for mean length of utterance in words (MLUwords ), a general index of grammatical complexity, and auditory experience, as measured by hearing age (HA) and chronological age (CA), respectively. Natural speech samples from 116 monolingual French-speaking children, including 40 children with CIs followed longitudinally and 76 TD children, were collected. FWs and AGRs were analysed using a Part of Speech Tagger (POS-T) from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The two groups differed by 3 years for HA and CA. No effect of family socio-economic status (SES) was found in the CI group. Stepwise regression analyses showed that the two groups did not share the same predictors of MLUwords : plurals and determiners predicted MLUwords in children with CIs, at 2 and 3 years of HA, whereas feminine markers and subject-pronouns were found to best predict MLUwords in TD children at 2 and 3 years of CA. Structural equation models (SEMs), a combination of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and path analysis, yielded a different hierarchical structure of grammatical relations (GRs). Selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and other pronominal forms were found specifically in the CI group (object-pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Dependency grammar analysis confirmed these contrasting developmental profiles in multiword utterances, such as preposition/nouns, subject/verbs, and verb/determiner/nouns. Atypical grammatical patterns in children with CIs reflect a specific architecture of syntactic dependencies of FWs underpinning morphological complexity and syntactic connectivity. Clinical implications are discussed for assessment and intervention planning. What is already known on this subject The productive use of FWs has been identified as a particular area of weakness in children with CIs compared with TD children. In addition, heterogenous grammatical performance has often been found after 1-3 years of CI use, regardless of demographic factors such as age at implantation, duration of deafness or SES. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Assessing the early building of FWs and AGRs in children with CIs helps to understand the syntactic complexity and hierarchical structure of their language. Since most corpus studies on grammatical morphology have been conducted in English, it is not clear whether their difficulties can be generalized to other languages. The French language has a system of FWs and inflections that determine the morphophonological properties of nominal and verbal forms. Early grammar learning in children with CIs born with profound deafness were compared with the two groups of TD children matched both for duration of auditory experience (i.e., HA of CI children, CA of TD children) and for MLUwords . We found a similar profile between groups at 2 years but not at 3 years for HA and CA. The two groups do not share the same predictors of MLUwords : namely, plurals and determiners for CI children versus feminine markers and subject pronouns for TD children. They show a different syntactic organization of GRs. Children with CIs struggle with selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and pronominal forms (object-pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Consistent with theories of morphophonological richness and syntactic connectivity, our results support the distributional learning hypothesis of language acquisition that infants and toddlers are sensitive to FWs and AGRs at an early age. Specific components of syntactic organization are disrupted in children with CIs. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? This work has potential clinical implications because it unravels the limitations of morphophonological processing in children with CIs. Its results highlight a specific difficulty in learning FWs and AGRs in a verbal inflectional morphology context.

The negotiation of epistemic and deontic rights in child-adult interactions in colloquial Jakartan Indonesian

Discourse markers can function to mark epistemic and deontic modality. This study aims to explore how children and adults apply the discourse marker deh to signal their epistemic and deontic rights. Previous studies only dealt with how the deontic aspect of deh is used in determining future actions. There is no discussion on how the speakers use epistemic and deontic rights in interactions even though both are interrelated. Furthermore, the previous studies only dealt with adults' language. The present study explores how epistemic and deontic rights are marked by children and adults with deh by conducting a discourse analysis. The data were obtained from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). Speakers' neglect of information offered to them reveals that they instead make decisions based on the knowledge they get from their experiences. With this knowledge, the speakers make the message they deliver when they direct others' future actions. Deh reveals speakers' expectations that others will take an action based on the speakers' requests. While children still produce indirect arguments or even, they do not make any arguments, in some cases, adults directly provide arguments to support the claims of adults' deontic rights. Adults tend to talk about hypothetical events in the future in defending their ideas. It never happens in the case of children. The speakers of deh position themselves as the ones with higher epistemic and deontic rights. When the speakers manage future actions and the others do not agree with them, they do not insist that the recipients do what they ask. They realize that the recipients also have the right to decide. Ignoring others’ rights will harm their social relationships.

Frequency, Form and Function of Dyadic Questions in Children with Autism: A CHILDES corpus study.

Children's questions to their caregivers - and caregivers' questions to their children - play an important role in child development. For children on the autism spectrum, who often experience cognitive, linguistic and social difficulties, prior research on questions has resulted in inconsistent and incomplete findings. The present study characterized the frequency, form, and function of queries posed by children on the autism spectrum (n = 12), non-spectrum peers (n =20), and parents using the Nadig ASD English Corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Results suggested that children on the autism spectrum and their caregivers produced fewer questions than non-spectrum dyads; however, whereas wh- questions were under-represented in the repertoire of children on the spectrum, they were over-represented in the repertoire of their parents. Finally, question function was similarly diverse for parents and children across groups. These findings offer important clinical implications for question-asking interventions targeting this population.

Measurement of Lexical Diversity in Children's Spoken Language: Computational and Conceptual Considerations.

BackgroundType-Token Ratio (TTR), given its relatively simple hand computation, is one of the few LSA measures calculated by clinicians in everyday practice. However, it has significant well-documented shortcomings; these include instability as a function of sample size, and absence of clear developmental profiles over early childhood. A variety of alternative measures of lexical diversity have been proposed; some, such as Number of Different Words/100 (NDW) can also be computed by hand. However, others, such as Vocabulary Diversity (VocD) and the Moving Average Type Token Ratio (MATTR) rely on complex resampling algorithms that cannot be conducted by hand. To date, no large-scale study of all four measures has evaluated how well any capture typical developmental trends over early childhood, or whether any reliably distinguish typical from atypical profiles of expressive child language ability.Materials and MethodsWe conducted linear and non-linear regression analyses for TTR, NDW, VocD, and MATTR scores for samples taken from 946 corpora from typically developing preschool children (ages 2–6 years), engaged in adult-child toy play, from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). These were contrasted with 504 samples from children known to have delayed expressive language skills (total n = 1,454 samples). We also conducted a separate sub-analysis which examined possible contextual effects of sampling environment on lexical diversity.ResultsOnly VocD showed significantly different mean scores between the typically -developing children and delayed developing children group. Using TTR would actually misdiagnose typical children and miss children with known language impairment. However, computation of VocD as a function of toy interactions was significant and emerges as a further caution in use of lexical diversity as a valid proxy index of children’s expressive vocabulary skill.DiscussionThis large scale statistical comparison of computer-implemented algorithms for expressive lexical profiles in young children with traditional, hand-calculated measures showed that only VocD met criteria for evidence-based use in LSA. However, VocD was impacted by sample elicitation context, suggesting that non-linguistic factors, such as engagement with elicitation props, contaminate estimates of spoken lexical skill in young children. Implications and suggested directions are discussed.

Phonetic Characteristics of Children's Early Words in German: Data From Typically Developing Children With Clinical Implications

Purpose:This study examined sound sequencing characteristics of German children's early words to compare with the patterns established for American English. We focused on consonant place of articulation for comparative purposes to Aoyama and Davis (2017) on children acquiring American English. Consonant–vowel–consonant (C1VC2) word forms is a frequent clinical target area for children receiving speech intervention for delays or disorders. Our goal is to provide useful background information for clinical decisions with German-speaking children.Method:Data from 13 German-speaking children were analyzed using the Child Language Data Exchange System database. First and second consonants in C1VC2word forms were coded as a labial (e.g., /p/, /b/, /m/), a coronal (alveolar and palatal, e.g., /t/, /d/, /n/), or a dorsal (velar, e.g., /k/, /g/, /ŋ/). All word types and tokens were then categorized into nine place–sequence types (e.g., labial–labial, Baum /baʊm/ “tree”; labial–coronal, mit /mɪt/ “with”; labial–velar, Weg /vɛk/ “path”).Results:C1VC2words consisting of labial–coronal and coronal–coronal sequences occurred more frequently than other sequences (e.g., labial–labial, coronal–labial). Words with labial–coronal sequences were much more frequent than the opposite coronal–labial sequences, similar to English. Some sequences involving dorsals (i.e., dorsal–labial) are relatively frequent in German words compared to English words.Conclusions:Results demonstrated both similarities and differences with previous studies of typically developing children learning American English. In both German and English, labial–coronal and coronal–coronal sequences were by far the most frequent. Sequences involving dorsal consonants were more frequent in German than in English. For clinical planning, results suggest that place-of-articulation patterns in C1VC2words are similar between German and English words (e.g., high frequencies of labial–coronal and coronal–coronal sequences). However, sequences involving dorsals are more frequent in German than in English. For intervention, this information can be used to guide selection of words containing sound sequences that are frequent for German-speaking children.

A corpus-based comparative analysis of elementary school English textbooks in South Korea and China

The present study aims to provide implications applicable to Korean English education by comparing Korean and Chinese elementary school English textbooks. Five types of Korean elementary school English textbooks and three types of Chinese elementary school English textbooks for 6th grade were constructed as a corpus. To find out how Korean and Chinese elementary English textbooks differs from English corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) were selected. The study results are as follows. First, in terms of vocabulary characteristics, Chinese textbooks had higher lexical diversity and used more familiar, concrete and emotional vocabulary. Second, in terms of sentence and discourse characteristics, as the esult of the average sentence length, syntactic complexity of the sentence, readability index, cohesion analysis, text difficulty of Chinese textbooks was higher. Third, although the high-frequency vocabulary of Korean and Chinese English textbooks was generally similar, there was a difference in that first and second person pronouns are used more frequently and the conjunction ‘and’ is used less frequently in Korean textbooks. As a result of comparison with the English corpus, the high-frequency vocabulary of Korean and Chinese textbooks was more similar to the children’s corpus rather than the general corpus.

Oral Narrative Intervention by Tele-Practice in a Case with Developmental Language Disorder.

Background: A narrative requires the integration and management of linguistic and cognitive skills. It has been observed that children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties in narrating stories. This research proposes an intervention in a case of a child 9 years and 2 months old with DLD, with the aim of improving his oral narrative skills through a retelling task via telepractice. Methods: In the evaluation, standardized tests have been used and a ‘remembering a story’ task, with a story titled The Lost Backpack, elaborated by one of the authors. Narratives were elicited in two sessions, and were transcribed, coded, and analysed using the Child Language Data Exchange System CHILDES Project tool. The participant received a total of 10 sessions through the Skype platform, which included intervention-addressed explicit instruction about the narrative structure and the use of discourse markers to improve cohesion in story retelling. Results: Significant changes were observed in the retelling of the story at microstructure and macrostructure levels: an increase of the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), Types and Tokens, specific vocabulary, discourse markers and the recall of events. Conclusions: These results demonstrate the effectiveness of intervention in narrative skills through the oral retelling of a story with visual support via tele-practice.

The Index of Productive Syntax: Psychometric Properties and Suggested Modifications.

The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) is a well-known language sample analysis tool. However, its psychometric properties have not been assessed across a wide sample of typically developing preschool-age children and children with language disorders. We sought to determine the profile of IPSyn scores by age over early childhood. We additionally explored whether the IPSyn could be shortened to fewer items without loss of information and whether the required language sample could be shortened from a current required number of 100 utterances to 50. We used transcripts from the Child Language Data Exchange System, including 1,051 samples of adult-child conversational play with toys within the theoretical framework of item response theory. Samples included those from typically developing children as well as children with hearing loss, Down syndrome, and late language emergence. The Verb Phrase and Sentence Structure subscales showed more stable developmental trajectories over the preschool years and greater differentiation between typical and atypical cohorts than did the Noun Phrase and Question/Negation subscales. A number of current IPSyn scoring items can be dropped without loss of information, and 50-utterance samples demonstrate most of the same psychometric properties of longer samples. Our findings suggest ways in which the IPSyn can be automated and streamlined (proposed IPSyn-C) so as to provide useful clinical guidance with fewer items and a shorter required language sample. Reference values for the IPSyn-C are provided. Trajectories for one subscale (Question/Negation) appear inherently unstable and may require structured elicitation. Potential limitations, ramifications, and future directions are discussed. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16915690.

Emotion words in early childhood: A language transcript analysis

Children learn the abstract, challenging categories of emotions from young ages, and it has recently been suggested that language (and more specifically emotion words) may aid this learning. To examine the language that young children hear and produce as they’re learning emotion categories, the present study examined nearly 2000 transcripts from 179 children ranging from 15- to 47-months from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Results provide key descriptive, developmental, and predictive information regarding child emotion language production, including the finding that child emotion word production was predicted by mothers’ emotion word production (β = 0.21, p < .001), but not by child or mother language complexity (β = 0.01, p = .690; β = 0.00, p = .872). Frequency of specific emotion words are presented, as are developmental trends in early emotion language production and input. These results improve the understanding of children’s daily emotional language environments and may inform theories of emotional development.

Word Segmentation Cues in German Child-Directed Speech: A Corpus Analysis.

To acquire language, infants must learn to segment words from running speech. A significant body of experimental research shows that infants use multiple cues to do so; however, little research has comprehensively examined the distribution of such cues in naturalistic speech. We conducted a comprehensive corpus analysis of German child-directed speech (CDS) using data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database, investigating the availability of word stress, transitional probabilities (TPs), and lexical and sublexical frequencies as potential cues for word segmentation. Seven hours of data (~15,000 words) were coded, representing around an average day of speech to infants. The analysis revealed that for 97% of words, primary stress was carried by the initial syllable, implicating stress as a reliable cue to word onset in German CDS. Word identity was also marked by TPs between syllables, which were higher within than between words, and higher for backwards than forwards transitions. Words followed a Zipfian-like frequency distribution, and over two-thirds of words (78%) were monosyllabic. Of the 50 most frequent words, 82% were function words, which accounted for 47% of word tokens in the entire corpus. Finally, 15% of all utterances comprised single words. These results give rich novel insights into the availability of segmentation cues in German CDS, and support the possibility that infants draw on multiple converging cues to segment their input. The data, which we make openly available to the research community, will help guide future experimental investigations on this topic.

Using Free Computer-Assisted Language Sample Analysis to Evaluate and Set Treatment Goals for Children Who Speak African American English.

Purpose Spoken language sample analysis (LSA) is widely considered to be a critical component of assessment for child language disorders. It is our best window into a preschool child's everyday expressive communicative skills. However, historically, the process can be cumbersome, and reference values against which LSA findings can be "benchmarked" are based on surprisingly little data. Moreover, current LSA protocols potentially disadvantage speakers of nonmainstream English varieties, such as African American English (AAE), blurring the line between language difference and disorder. Method We provide a tutorial on the use of free software (Computerized Language Analysis [CLAN]) enabled by the ongoing National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders-funded "Child Language Assessment Project." CLAN harnesses the advanced computational power of the Child Language Data Exchange System archive (www.childes.talkbank.org), with an aim to develop and test fine-grained and potentially language variety-sensitive benchmarks for a range of LSA measures. Using retrospective analysis of data from AAE-speaking children, we demonstrate how CLAN LSA can facilitate dialect-fair assessment and therapy goal setting. Results Using data originally collected to norm the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation, we suggest that Developmental Sentence Scoring does not appear to bias against children who speak AAE but does identify children who have language impairment (LI). Other LSA measure scores were depressed in the group of AAE-speaking children with LI but did not consistently differentiate individual children as LI. Furthermore, CLAN software permits rapid, in-depth analysis using Developmental Sentence Scoring and the Index of Productive Syntax that can identify potential intervention targets for children with developmental language disorder.

Family Conversations About Heat and Temperature: Implications for Children's Learning.

Some science educators claim that children enter science classrooms with a conception of heat considered by physicists to be incorrect and speculate that “misconceptions” may result from the way heat is talked about in everyday language (e.g., Lautrey and Mazens, 2004; Slotta and Chi, 2006). We investigated talk about heat in naturalistic conversation to explore the claim that children often hear heat discussed as a substance rather than as a process, potentially hindering later learning of heat as energy involved in emergent processes. We explored naturalistic speech among children and adults to understand the nature and the frequency of heat- and temperature-related conversations that young children are involved in. This study aims to investigate the actual linguistic resources that children have available as part of a sociocultural approach to cognitive development. Parents’ everyday conversations about heat and temperature with their 2–6-year-old children were drawn from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) language database and from a parent–child book-reading study. Parents used the word heat rarely, but they did so in ways that implied it is a substance. Parents never talked about heat as an emergent process but sometimes as a direct causal process. Most of the heat- and temperature-related talk, however, focused on words like hot and cold to describe temperature as a property of objects. This investigation of what young children actually experience in everyday conversations is a step toward studying how everyday language may play a role in children’s understanding of heat and temperature.

How ordinary child language acquisition processes can lead to the unusual outcome of a mixed language

Aims and Objectives: The aim of this study is to examine the language processing mechanisms involved when young children bring structural innovations into their community way of speaking, as part of conventionalising code-switching practices to become a mixed language. Approach: The study takes a qualitative approach to the analysis of child language acquisition and adult speech data in two contexts. Data and Analysis: The study analyses naturalistic and spontaneous speech data of children and adults speaking the mixed language, Light Warlpiri, and adults older than that age group who do not speak the new mixed language. It compares an innovative auxiliary form in Light Warlpiri to child non-target speech in English with data taken from the Child Language Data Exchange System corpus. Findings: The findings are that the Light Warlpiri-speaking children used processes of re-analysis that are commonly found in child first language acquisition in other contexts to re-analyse elements of the verbal input, but because of the sociolinguistic context they created an innovative structure. Originality: The study is the first to directly compare processes of innovation in language contact with those of non-target structures in monolingual child language acquisition, identifying the same processes in each. It is also the first to show that a dramatic structural change from a linguistic perspective may be a small, incremental change from a child learner’s perspective. Significance/Implications: The significance of the study is that until now processes of innovation in language contact situations have been thought by many to differ in quality from those in monolingual child language acquisition contexts. This study shows that the child language acquisition processes are the same in each situation, but different sociolinguistic contexts lead to different outcomes for the communities’ ways of speaking. It also shows that children do not bring in new structure that is not motivated by their input; rather, they make small changes to the input they receive.