Children's Acquisition Research Articles

What time words teach us about children's acquisition of the temporal reasoning system.

Here I consider the possible role of the temporal updating system in the development of the temporal reasoning system. Using evidence from children's acquisition of time words, I argue that abstract temporal concepts are not built from primitive representations of time. Instead, I propose that language and cultural learning provide the primary sources of the temporal reasoning system.

Association between Ability to Discriminate Speech Sounds and Process of Articulation Acquisition in Children with Articulation Disorders

Association between Ability to Discriminate Speech Sounds and Process of Articulation Acquisition in Children with Articulation Disorders

Reading Acquisition in Children: Developmental Processes and Dyslexia-Specific Effects.

Decreased activation to print in the left ventral, dorsal, and anterior pathways has been implicated in readers with dyslexia (DRs) but also is characteristic for typical beginning readers. Because most studies have compared DRs with their age-matched peers, the observed results could represent a dyslexia phenotype or a developmental delay. This study aimed to disentangle reading and dyslexia effects using 2 control groups matched for age and skill and a longitudinal design. Brain response for print was compared in DRs and typical readers (TRs) who, at the beginning of schooling (time point 1 [TP]; 6-7 years old), read on average 3 words per minute, as did DRs at TP1, but improved their reading to an average level, and advanced readers (ARs) who at TP1 read as well as DRs 2 years later (TP3; 8-9 years old). The TR and DR groups were tracked longitudinally to observe neurodevelopmental changes. At TP1, DRs did not differ from TRs. Over time, only TRs developed a neural circuit for reading in the left inferior frontal and fusiform gyri. At TP3, DRs exhibited hypo-activation in these areas compared with age-matched (TRs at TP3) and reading-matched (ARs at TP1) controls. At TP3, TRs showed hypo-activation in the left frontal and bilateral ventral occipital regions compared with ARs, but these effects were nonoverlapping with DR hypo-activations and are partly explained by IQ. Decreased activation of the left fusiform and inferior frontal gyri to print in DRs results from an atypical developmental trajectory of reading and cannot be explained solely by lower reading skills.

Sources of individual differences in young Chinese children's reading and mathematics skill: A longitudinal study

This study investigated the longitudinal associations between four key elements of school readiness—receptive vocabulary, socioemotional behavior, behavioral self-regulation, and approaches to learning—and individual differences in young children's reading and mathematics trajectories. Chinese children (N = 588) were tested three times between the ages of five and six on their Chinese reading and mathematics skills, and their receptive vocabulary, problem behavior, behavioral self-regulation, and approaches to learning (competence motivation, learning strategy, and attention/persistence) were assessed at five years of age. Latent growth modeling revealed that receptive vocabulary and behavioral self-regulation played unique roles in predicting the levels of Chinese reading (vocabulary: β = 0.15, p = .023; self-regulation: β = 0.16, p = .001) and mathematics skills (vocabulary: β = 0.25, p < .001; self-regulation: β = 0.36, p < .001). Problem behavior and competence motivation were associated with the levels of mathematics skills (problem behavior: β = −0.06, p = .046; competence motivation: β = 0.16, p < .001) but not those of reading skills. Moreover, competence motivation predicted the growth rate of Chinese reading skills (β = 0.18, p = .015). The findings extend the current literature by explicating the independent contributions made by early school readiness skills to individual differences in young Chinese children's acquisition of reading and mathematics skills.

Lexical Development in Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): How ASD May Affect Intake From the Input.

Most children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have below-age lexical knowledge and lexical representation. Our goal is to examine ways in which difficulties with social communication and language processing that are often associated with ASD may constrain these children's abilities to learn new words and to explore whether minimizing the social communication and processing demands of the learning situation can lead to successful learning. In this narrative review of recent work on lexical development in ASD, we describe key findings on children's acquisition of nouns, pronouns, and verbs and outline our research program currently in progress aimed at further elucidating these issues. Our review of studies that examine lexical development in children with ASD suggests that innovative intervention approaches that take into account both the social communication and processing demands of the learning situation may be particularly beneficial. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7324013.

A Study on the Korean Language Acquisition of Children from Chinese Families in Korea: Focusing on Pronunciation and Vocabulary

A Study on the Korean Language Acquisition of Children from Chinese Families in Korea: Focusing on Pronunciation and Vocabulary

Reprint of “Conceptual change and knowledge integration as learning processes in higher education: A latent transition analysis”

Conceptual change, that is, a restructuring of incompatible prior knowledge, is a well investigated learning mechanism in school children's acquisition of new concepts. An understanding of academic concepts is also a central learning goal of higher education. However, there is almost no research on conceptual change and knowledge integration in higher education. We tracked 137 undergraduate psychology students' concepts of human memory longitudinally over four semesters. A latent profile transition analysis (LPTA) showed that the students' development followed six transition paths between four knowledge profiles. These developmental pathways were well-ordered, indicated a general trend from fragmented knowledge to integrated scientific knowledge, and correlated with the students' university grades and with an additional test of memory understanding. The findings highlight the importance of conceptual change, in particular, knowledge integration in higher education, and exemplify the usefulness of LPTA for modeling individual differences in longitudinal changes of multidimensional knowledge structures.

Providing Interventions That Support Literacy Acquisition in Children With Hearing Loss

Today, children with hearing loss are often identified at birth, fitted with advanced hearing technology, and enrolled in family-centered early intervention. Most of these children have the opportunity to enter kindergarten or first grade with language competencies that rival their hearing peers. For these children to be successful communicators ready to learn, professionals serving them and their families—such as early interventionists, speech-language pathologists, and early childhood educators—must understand the developmental, communicative, and educational challenges inherent to childhood hearing loss. Likewise, these professionals also must be competent practitioners in the provision of evidence-based interventions that establish the critical foundations for literacy acquisition.

Is it better to be happy or to be proud at school before doing a text comprehension task? First evidence with 10-year-old children

Introduction and objectiveAn experiment was conducted in a school context to examine whether joy and pride, two positive emotions, can promote children's acquisition of knowledge in a reading comprehension situation. MethodThe experiment consisted of inducing either a positive emotion (i.e., joy, pride) or a neutral state to 10-year-old children using an autobiographical recall task. Once the induced state was evaluated, children were submitted to a reading/comprehension task of a neutral text. When they finished reading this text, a questionnaire was used to assess not only their memory of the information provided in the text, but also their ability to make inferences. ResultsOur main results highlighted a positive effect of joy on children's inference making. ConclusionThis study confirmed the relevance of taking into account the emotional state of children engaged in knowledge acquisition situations at school.

The Differences of Language Acquisition in Children: Based on Negative Polarity Items

This paper examines differences of the participants’ Negative Polarity Item(NPI) responses and discovers the reason for the differences. Sixty children aged four to six took part in the experiment for this study. In the result, the participants produced more NPIs in object position than in subject position. The K5 group produced fewer NPIs among the three groups during the experiment. Unlike English any -type NPIs, other NPIs such as hanato and amwusalam-to can be used instead of Korean NPIs amwuto . Compared to the study done by Kim (2016), the Korean children produced much more NPIs both in subject and object positions. Another finding here is that the difference is not statistically significant both in subject and object positions unlike Kim’s study. In summary, the responses manifested no subject/object asymmetry for NPIs in Korean.

Hy leer dit nie hier nie (‘He doesn't learn it here’): talking about children's swearing in extended families in multilingual South Africa

ABSTRACTThis paper explores family language policy as a conceptual framework for exploring the ideologies around swearing and children in a multilingual family environment. The case study revolves around two young male children born to adolescent mothers living in socio-economically marginalised neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa. Whilst family language policy research has traditionally investigated children's language learning in multilingual family contexts, this paper focuses on practices and discourses around swearing. The children are raised in a particular type of family: their young parents do not live together, but with their respective extended families. Drawing on recordings of interactions and casual conversations, the paper shows that swearing is an important topic for adults within talk around children's language. General questions around family language policy uncover the participants’ association of children's use of Afrikaans with swearing. Moreover, the interpretation of empirical data brings to the fore the contradictions between language socialisation practices and expressed family language policies around children's acquisition of swearwords. Furthermore, the paper highlights how beliefs around children and swearing are not expressed within the nuclear family as a social unit, but rather along extended family lines – thereby emphasising the processes of ‘family making’.

Myths about bilingual learning in family life settings: Werner Leopold's child language biographies and contemporary work on children's play practices

In four volumes, Werner Leopold documented his first child's acquisition of German and English (e.g. 1939; 1949). In this article I problematize contemporary myths about bilingualism that partly da ...

Conceptual change and knowledge integration as learning processes in higher education: A latent transition analysis

Conceptual change, that is, a restructuring of incompatible prior knowledge, is a well investigated learning mechanism in school children's acquisition of new concepts. An understanding of academic concepts is also a central learning goal of higher education. However, there is almost no research on conceptual change and knowledge integration in higher education. We tracked 137 undergraduate psychology students' concepts of human memory longitudinally over four semesters. A latent profile transition analysis (LPTA) showed that the students' development followed six transition paths between four knowledge profiles. These developmental pathways were well-ordered, indicated a general trend from fragmented knowledge to integrated scientific knowledge, and correlated with the students' university grades and with an additional test of memory understanding. The findings highlight the importance of conceptual change, in particular, knowledge integration in higher education, and exemplify the usefulness of LPTA for modeling individual differences in longitudinal changes of multidimensional knowledge structures.

The Effect of Using Educational Drama on Kindergarten Children's Acquisition of Mathematical and Scientific Concepts in Jordan

The study aimed to examin the effect of using educational drama on kindergarten children's acquisition of mathematical and scientific concepts. A quasi-experimental method with experimental and control groups was usedto achieve the objectives of the study. Various instruments were used, including a teacher's guide based on educational drama strategy and a scientific/mathematical concepts test. After validating these instruments, they were applied on a random sample of 50 kindergarten children during the first semester of school year 2016/2017. The study concluded that the experimental group outperformed control group on the scientific/mathematical concepts test. The findings also revealed that there were no significant statistical differences attributed to gender of the experimental group in the acquisition of such concepts.

The Effect of Using Educational Drama on Kindergarten Children's Acquisition of Mathematical and Scientific Concepts in Jordan

The study aimed to examin the effect of using educational drama on kindergarten children's acquisition of mathematical and scientific concepts. A quasi-experimental method with experimental and control groups was usedto achieve the objectives of the study. Various instruments were used, including a teacher's guide based on educational drama strategy and a scientific/mathematical concepts test. After validating these instruments, they were applied on a random sample of 50 kindergarten children during the first semester of school year 2016/2017. The study concluded that the experimental group outperformed control group on the scientific/mathematical concepts test. The findings also revealed that there were no significant statistical differences attributed to gender of the experimental group in the acquisition of such concepts.

Children's Acquisition of the English Past-Tense: Evidence for a Single-Route Account From Novel Verb Production Data.

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past‐tense as its test case. The single‐route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past‐tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual‐route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993) posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal “add ‐ed” rule that does not require analogy across regular past‐tense forms. Children (aged 3–4; 5–6; 6–7; 9–10) saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake). Past‐tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal “did yesterday.” Collapsing across age group (since no interaction was observed), the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past‐tense form (e.g., gezzed; chaked) was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single‐route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past‐tense is best explained by a single‐route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules.

The Effect of the Activities Enhanced Concerning Time Concept on Time Concept Acquisition of Children

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the activities enhanced concerning time concept on time concept acquisition of children. The research is a quantitative study in experimental model with pretest - posttest control group aiming to examine the effect of the activities enhanced concerning time concept on time concept acquisition of children. The study group of the research consists of 60 months old and older children who attend nursery schools within Uludag University in Nilufer County in the city centre of Bursa in 2016-2017 education year. 13 children in the experimental group and 16 children in the control group totally 29 children consist the study group of the research. The experimental and the control groups were performed pre-test and post-test. Within the research a pictorial form including 29 questions that were prepared by the researchers, was used as data gathering tool in order to measure the knowledge of the children about time concept. In order to see the difference between the experimental and the control group, Mann Whitney U Test was applied. It was determined that the activities enhanced regarding time concept affected the perception of the children about time concept in a positive way.

Intrinsic insula network engagement underlying children's reading and arithmetic skills

The neural substrates of children's reading and arithmetic skills have long been of great interest to cognitive neuroscientists. However, most previous studies have focused on the contrast between these skills as specific domains. Here, we investigate the potentially shared processes across these domains by focusing on how the neural circuits associated with cognitive control influence reading and arithmetic proficiency in 8-to-10-year-old children. Using a task-free resting state approach, we correlated the intrinsic functional connectivity of the right anterior insula (rAI) network with performance on assessments of Chinese character recognition, reading comprehension, subtraction, and multiplication performance. A common rAI network strengthened for reading and arithmetic skill, including the right middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and superior temporal gyrus (STG) in the lateral temporal cortex, as well as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In addition, performance measures evidenced rAI network specializations. Single character recognition was uniquely associated with connectivity to the right superior parietal lobule (SPL). Reading comprehension only, rather than character recognition, was associated with connectivity to the right IFG, MTG and angular gyrus (AG). Furthermore, subtraction was associated with connectivity to premotor cortex whereas multiplication was associated with the supramarginal gyrus. Only reading comprehension and multiplication were associated with hyper connectivity within local rAI network. These results indicate that during a critical period for children's acquisition of reading and arithmetic, these skills are supported by both intra-network synchronization and inter-network connectivity of rAI circuits. Domain-general intrinsic insular connectivity at rest contained also, functional components that segregated into different sets of skill-related networks. The embedded components of cognitive control may be essential to understanding the interplay of multiple functional circuits necessary to more fully characterize cognitive skill acquisition.

Common Ground and Development

AbstractLanguage and other forms of communication are inherently ambiguous and therefore require some form of common ground to specify the intended meanings of utterances. Theoretical accounts usually focus on interactions between adults and consider recursive mindreading a prerequisite to establishing common ground. Contrasting these accounts, in this article, we offer a developmental perspective on common ground. We propose that instead of using recursive mindreading, infants rely initially on the expectation that communicative partners act rationally in light of previous interactions, which serves as a starting point for common ground to develop. We describe the changing role of common ground across development. Initially, common ground constrains the meaning of ambiguous communicative acts and facilitates children's acquisition of language. Later in development, common ground makes communication efficient by helping speakers coordinate their actions and intentions, and eventually arrive at recursive mindreading.

&lt;b&gt;O homem na linguagem: o entrelaçamento língua e cultura na aquisição da linguagem numa perspectiva enunciativa aquisicional

O tema central deste artigo é a vivência da tríade homem, linguagem e cultura manifestada na experiência de aquisição da linguagem pela criança. Para tanto, a discussão pauta-se em princípios advindos dos trabalhos de Émile Benveniste e filia-se a uma abordagem enunciativa aquisicional da linguagem da criança, a qual aponta para o fato de que a criança, em sua experiência de aquisição da linguagem, acessa valores culturais revelados no simbólico da língua e mobiliza-os sempre na dependência do aqui-agora por ela vivenciado em suas enunciações.