Giunta and Pouscoulous’ review “Learning to Presuppose” makes an important contribution by bringing together a fragmented literature on presupposition development and providing evidence that children display presuppositional abilities earlier than traditionally assumed. This commentary argues that the review also raises a broader theoretical question that remains largely unexplored: whether presuppositional competence constitutes a unified cognitive achievement or a collection of partially distinct abilities. Drawing on parallels with developmental pragmatics, I suggest that different presupposition triggers and presuppositional phenomena may recruit different cognitive resources. Understanding this heterogeneity may represent an important direction for future research.
Narrative skills are important for communication and everyday interaction. This study examined how Mandarin-speaking children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce oral narratives. Thirty-six Mandarin-speaking monolingual children at the preschool educational stage participated, including 18 children with ASD (mean age = 6;4, SD = 0;11) and 18 typically developing (TD) children (mean age = 6;1, SD = 0;4) who were matched on chronological age and expressive lexical ability. Children completed picture-based storytelling tasks from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Narrative production was analyzed in three dimensions: macrostructure (global organization of the story), microstructure (internal linguistic units), and internal state terms (ISTs). Results showed that children with ASD did not differ significantly from their TD peers in Attempt, IST diversity, or basic productivity measures, including the total number of utterances, the number of different words, and the overall frequency of conjunctions. In contrast, the ASD group showed significantly lower performance on story structure, story complexity, Goal, and Outcome, and produced fewer total words, shorter mean length of utterance in words, and fewer complex sentences. These findings indicate that Mandarin-speaking children with ASD show narrative difficulties in production, with particular weaknesses in macrostructural organization and specific aspects of microstructure. The results add to cross-linguistic evidence on autism-related narrative challenges and highlight the need for interventions in Mandarin that target episode organization, narrative elaboration, and syntactic complexity.
I welcome the views of the commentators and am glad that they are likewise enthusiastic about neural network accounts. Nonetheless, I also acknowledge their criticisms, including a lack of attention to processing accounts.
Claims about bilingual advantages in children’s social cognition remain unsettled, particularly when language proficiency and context are taken seriously. This study examined advanced theory of mind in Syrian Arabic–Turkish sequential bilinguals in Türkiye. One hundred bilingual children (11–12 years) and 50 Turkish monolingual peers completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test–Child (RMET) and the Faux Pas Recognition Test–Child; bilinguals were randomly assigned to Arabic or Turkish assessment. Monolinguals outperformed bilinguals on RMET, Faux Pas, control, and total Faux Pas scores. Within the bilingual sample, Turkish assessment improved RMET performance but not Faux Pas performance. These patterns remained after adjustment for age, nonverbal reasoning, Turkish attainment, preschool duration, and household size. The findings suggest that advanced social-cognitive performance in immigrant bilinguals is shaped less by language status alone than by school-language experience and the broader ecology in which bilingualism is lived.
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.
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.
Riches’ article proposes that developmental language disorder is a consequence of exemplar-based learning. While there is a lot of merit to the proposal, there are also areas that need further clarity – primarily whether the difficulty lies in the exemplars, the generalisation/abstraction processes that operate over exemplars, or both.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 sh & igrave;, 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 sh & igrave;-marked conditions. These findings highlight the language-specific cue weighting in Mandarin and the distinct focus comprehension profiles of CI and ASD children.
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.
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 sorci & egrave;re," 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.
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 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.
We respond to Riches' article in which he puts forth the idea that exemplar-based learning is the underlying deficit in children with Developmental Language Disorder, grounded in Dell and Chang's P-Chain model. We affirm the potential contributions of exemplar-based learning and explore other potential possibilities for mechanistic explanations of learning differences grounded in this model, including inhibitory control, working memory, extant knowledge, prediction error and feedback. We propose ways that these explanations might guide clinical practice.
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.
