This study investigates the development of nominal concord in Jordanian Arabic (JA) among children aged 2.0 to 10.11. Drawing on naturalistic data from the Child Language Corpus of JA, the analysis examined 441 obligatory noun–modifier contexts produced by 137 children. The dataset was restricted to contexts in which adult JA requires a marked concord form beyond default masculine singular agreement; noun phrases whose adult target was masculine singular were excluded. Accuracy in these marked contexts was lowest among children aged 2.0 to 4.11, remained similarly low in the 5.0 to 5.11 group, rose sharply in the 6.0 to 6.11 group, and exceeded 80% among children aged 7.0 to 10.11. The distribution of non-target patterns also changed with age. Early masculine singular overgeneralization gave way to mixed feature marking, followed by residual overgeneralization of plural concord in non-human plural contexts where feminine singular agreement was the established adult target in the relevant attributive construction. Within the mutually exclusive coding system, plural-concord overgeneralization was the most frequent residual pattern in the 6.0 to 6.11 group, whereas definiteness-only mismatches were the most frequent residual pattern in the oldest group. The study provides corpus-based evidence for differentiated development within the Arabic noun phrase while limiting its claims to the marked concord environments represented in the dataset.
This study investigates how monolingual and bilingual autistic children comprehend subject relative clauses (SRCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs) across two languages: French and German. It examines how phonological working memory (PWM), bilingual experience, and test language influence relative clause comprehension. Fifty-five autistic children (25 monolinguals, 30 bilinguals), aged between 4 and 12 years, were tested using a nonword repetition task indexing PWM, which has been previously linked to syntactic ability in autism. Three research questions were investigated: (a) whether clause type and test language affect comprehension accuracy across language groups; (b) whether PWM contributes differently to SRC versus ORC comprehension in monolingual and bilingual children; and (c) whether individual variation in bilingual exposure, quantified as cumulative exposure, modulates PWM’s contribution to syntactic processing. We adopted both between-group comparisons (monolingual vs. bilingual) and within-group analyses of bilingual variability. Generalized linear mixed-effects models were employed to assess group differences in accuracy, while linear mixed-effects models examined bilingual variation. Each research question was modeled separately, including fixed effects, interactions, and random intercepts. Age and socioeconomic status were covariates. Results showed that ORCs were consistently more challenging than SRCs across languages. Higher PWM predicted better accuracy in both languages. Monolinguals relied more on PWM for SRCs, while bilinguals showed a more uniform PWM effect across clause types. Notably, cumulative exposure to the test language contributed to higher ORC accuracy. These findings underscore how PWM and bilingual experience jointly shape syntactic processing in autism, highlighting the value of moving beyond categorical group comparisons. They also provide compelling evidence that bilingualism does not hinder syntactic comprehension in autism, reinforcing the recommendation to support bilingual input in autistic children.
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.
