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We use a longitudinal design to examine associations for a diverse sample of 2,120 Danish 16- to 30-month-old children between early expressive vocabulary and later reading and math outcomes in the sixth grade. Educational outcomes, in particular decoding and reading comprehension, can be predicted from an early vocabulary measure as early as 16 months with effect sizes (in proportion of variance accounted for) comparable to 1 year's mean growth in reading scores. The findings confirm in a relatively large population-based study that late talkers are at risk for low educational attainment because the majority of children experiencing early language delay obtain scores below average in measures of reading in the sixth grade. Low scores have the greatest predictive power, indicating that children with early delays have elevated risk for later reading problems.

The present study explored whether the phonological bias favoring consonants found in French-learning infants and children when learning new words (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005) is language-general, as proposed by Nespor, Peña and Mehler (2003), or varies across languages, perhaps as a function of the phonological or lexical properties of the language in acquisition. To do so, we used the interactive word-learning task set up by Havy and Nazzi (2009), teaching Danish-learning 20-month-olds pairs of phonetically similar words that contrasted either on one of their consonants or one of their vowels, by either one or two phonological features. Danish was chosen because it has more vowels than consonants, and is characterized by extensive consonant lenition. Both phenomena could disfavor a consonant bias. Evidence of word-learning was found only for vocalic information, irrespective of whether one or two phonological features were changed. The implication of these findings is that the phonological biases found in early lexical processing are not language-general but develop during language acquisition, depending on the phonological or lexical properties of the native language.

The present article reports results of a real-world effectiveness trial conducted in Denmark with six thousand four hundred eighty-three 3- to 6-year-olds designed to improve children's language and preliteracy skills. Children in 144 child cares were assigned to a control condition or one of three planned variations of a 20-week storybook-based intervention: a base intervention and two enhanced versions featuring extended professional development for educators or a home-based program for parents. Pre- to posttest comparisons revealed a significant impact of all three interventions for preliteracy skills (= .21-.27) but not language skills (d = .04-.16), with little differentiation among the three variations. Fidelity, indexed by number of lessons delivered, was a significant predictor of most outcomes. Implications for real-world research and practice are considered.

Structural quality in childcare centers is considered a precondition for process quality, which in turn is related to children's outcomes. However, the evidence on relations between structural and process quality is mixed. Moreover, despite strong theoretical claims, empirical evidence supporting the indirect relation of structural features through process quality on child outcomes is scarce. The current study contributes to the knowledge by (a) investigating the direct relations of structural teacher and classroom features with growth in children's language and preliteracy skills in a sample of more than 3,000 children, (b) studying the associations of process quality with children's outcomes using the widely used Classroom Assessment Scoring System Pre-K observational measure among more than 400 teachers, and (c) testing indirect effects of structural quality through process quality on growth in children's skills. Process quality was generally directly positively associated with gains in children's language and preliteracy skills, whereas structural quality showed few direct relations. In addition, the average level of children's initial language and preliteracy skills were positively related to gains, as was classrooms' proportion of non-Danish children (indirectly through process quality). The results illustrate the complexities of relations between structural and process quality and children's outcomes and warrant further research.

It is often assumed that all languages are fundamentally the same. This assumption has been challenged by research in linguistic typology and language evolution, but questions of language learning and use have largely been left aside. Here we review recent work on Danish that provides new insights into these questions. Unlike closely related languages, Danish has an unusually reduced phonetic structure, which seemingly delays Danish‐learning children in several aspects of their language acquisition. Adult language use appears to be affected as well, resulting, among other things, in an increased dependence on top‐down information in comprehension. In this conceptual review, we build the argument that a causal relationship may exist between the sound structure of Danish and the peculiarities of its acquisition and use. We argue that a theory of language learning that accommodates the existing evidence from Danish must explicitly account for the interaction between learner‐related factors and language‐specific constraints.

Research has shown that contoids (phonetically defined consonants) may provide more robust and reliable cues to syllable and word boundaries than vocoids (phonetically defined vowels). Recent studies of Danish, a language characterized by frequent long sequences of vocoids in speech, have suggested that the reduced occurrence of contoids may make speech in it intrinsically harder to segment than in closely related languages such as Norwegian. We addressed this hypothesis empirically in an artificial language learning experiment with native speakers of Danish, Norwegian, and English. We tested whether artificial speech consisting of concatenated contoid–vocoid syllables is easier to segment than speech consisting of vocoid–vocoid syllables where the first segment is a semivowel and the second a full vowel. Contrary to what was expected, we found no effect of the phonetic makeup of the syllables on speech segmentability. Possible interpretations and implications of this result are discussed. Open Practices This article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data badges. All materials and data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rmjtg. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

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