This paper investigates the comprehension of Relative Clauses (RCs) in 15 Mandarin children with suspected Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (aged between 4; 5 and 6; 0) and 29 typically developing (TD) controls. Results from a Character Picture Matching Task indicate that (i) the subject RC was better understood than the object RC in children…

This study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to…

Language is conventional because word meanings are shared among different people. The present study examined Chinese infants' understanding of the language convention that different people should generalize words in the same way. Thirteen-month-old Mandarin-speaking Chinese infants repeatedly viewed a speaker providing a novel label for a target…

This study investigates the contributions of semantic, phonological, and orthographic factors to morphological awareness of 413 Chinese-speaking students in Grades 2, 4, and 6, and its relationship with reading comprehension. Participants were orally presented with pairs of bimorphemic compounds and asked to judge whether the first morphemes of…

The present study compared the performance of twenty-seven French-speaking internationally adopted (IA) children from China to that of twenty-seven monolingual non-adopted French-speaking children (CTL) matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status on a Clitic Elicitation task. The IA children omitted significantly more accusative object…

Acquisition of English grammatical morphology was examined in five internationally adopted (IA) children from China (aged 0;10-1;1 at adoption) during the first three years' exposure to English to determine whether acquisition patterns were characteristic of child second language (L2) learners or monolingual first language (L1) learners. Results…

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…

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the…