Morphosyntactic Development in First Generation Arabic—English Children: The Effect of Cognitive, Age, and Input Factors over Time and across Languages

This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6–13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRT) in English and Syrian Arabic that included diverse morphosyntactic structures. Direct measures of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills were obtained, and a parent questionnaire provided the age at L2 acquisition onset (AOA) and input variables. We found the following: Dominance in the L1 was evident at both time periods, regardless of AOA, and growth in bilingual abilities was found over time. Cognitive skills accounted for substantial variance in SRT scores in both languages and at both times. An older AOA was associated with superior SRT scores at Time−1 for both languages, but at Time-2, older AOA only contributed to superior SRT scores in Arabic. Using the L2 with siblings gave a boost to English at Time−1 but had a negative effect on Arabic at Time-2. We conclude that first-generation children show strong heritage-L1 maintenance early on, and individual differences in cognitive skills have stable effects on morphosyntax in both languages over time, but age and input factors have differential effects on each language and over time.

Colorful Semantics in Cypriot-Greek-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

<b><i>Objectives:</i></b> The aims of this study were: (1) to investigate the effect of colorful semantics (CS) on the morphosyntactic and semantic development of Cypriot-Greek (CG)-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to obtain a better understanding of its role in an augmentative communication (AC) intervention program; (2) to address the paucity of intervention tools geared for CG-speaking children with ASD. <b><i>Participants and Methods:</i></b> The study included 24 boys and 16 girls with ASD, all preschool-aged 4–6 years. All were verbal but with limited production and minimal mean length of utterance. The study followed a randomized control trial design with equally sized experimental and control groups. The experimental group followed a therapeutic program using the AC with a CS protocol, while the control group’s AC intervention did not include the CS protocol. <b><i>Results:</i></b> The use of CS significantly improved the children’s semantic and morphosyntactic development. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> The intervention results illustrate the effectiveness of CS in this study; however, generalizability of effectiveness to other similar CG-speaking children with ASD requires further evidence.

L2 Spanish morphosyntactic development through collaborative writing: An analysis of mood production, text length and syntactic complexity

This study discusses the impact of interactionist output-oriented approaches, specifically, the effects of collaborative text reconstruction on subjunctive recognition and production in the written modality by English-dominant Spanish second-language learners. It also examines whether students’ text length and text complexity increase after treatment. A total of 104 fifth-semester Spanish learners participated in the study and were assigned to three conditions: control ( n = 36), dictogloss ( n = 33) and dictogloss plus explicit instruction ( n = 35). In order to measure target form recognition and production as well as text quality, participants completed a pre-, post- and delayed-post-test that included a guided written task and a recognition task. Results indicated that participants in both treatment groups increased their production of the subjunctive mood in the written modality in expected contexts at similar rates, which was also maintained over time. Participants also increased recognition rates, irrespective of group, pointing to a lack of relationship between this type of collaborative text reconstruction and subjunctive recognition. Lastly, an effect of group and time was also observed for text length and syntactic complexity, as participants in the treatment groups produced significantly longer texts, as well as a higher number of complement clauses.

Morphosyntactic Development and Severe Parental Neglect in 4-Year-Old French-Speaking Children: ELLAN study

Language is the most frequently compromised area of development in English-speaking neglected children, particularly the morphosyntactic component of language. This is very worrisome given its central role in academic success and social participation. No previous study has examined the morphosyntactic skills of French-speaking neglected children, despite the morphological richness of French. This study aimed to fill this gap. Forty-four neglected (mean age = 48.32 months, SD = 0.45) and 92 non-neglected (mean age = 48.07 months, SD = 0.24) French-speaking children participated. Measures of morphosyntactic skills were derived from a sample of spontaneous language collected during standardized semistructured play and analyzed using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software (2012) . Four morphosyntactic indicators were compared using analyses of variance and Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests: the mean length of utterances (MLU), verbal inflections, word-level errors, and omission errors. The results indicate that 25.6% of the neglected children presented clinically significant morphosyntactic difficulties, as evidenced by a significantly shorter MLU ( M = 5.60, SD = 1.13; M = 6.90, SD = 1.30), fewer verbal inflections, and more frequent word omission errors compared to their non-neglected peers. The results confirm that French-speaking neglected children present many morphosyntactic difficulties. This study argues for sustained speech–language services for these children.

Prosodic constraints on children’s use of grammatical morphemes

It has long been known that children may use a particular grammatical morpheme inconsistently at early stages of acquisition. Although this has often been thought to be evidence of incomplete syntactic representations, there is now a large body of crosslinguistic evidence showing that much of this early within-speaker variability is due to still developing phonological and/or prosodic representations. This article reviews recent research showing how a phonological approach to the emergence of grammatical morphology makes it possible to make crosslinguistic predictions about what will be acquired early and what acquired late. This is known as the Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis, providing a unified framework for understanding the course of morphosyntactic development across languages. The implications are both theoretical and methodological, suggesting that children may know more about the grammar of their language at an earlier age than is often assumed, and that this can only be revealed by taking prosodic phonology into account in designing early tests of syntactic development.