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A speaker's regional dialect is a rich source of information about that person. Two studies examined five- to six-year-old children's perception of regional dialect: Can they perceive differences among dialects? Have they made meaningful social connections to specific dialects? Experiment 1 asked children to categorize speakers into groups based on their accent; Experiment 2 asked them to match speakers to (un)familiar cultural items. Each child was tested with two of the following: the child's Home dialect, a Regional variant of that dialect, and a Second-Language variant. Results showed that children could successfully categorize only with a Home vs. Second-Language dialect contrast, but could reliably link cultural items with either a Home vs. Second-Language or a Regional vs. Second-Language dialect contrast. These results demonstrate five- to six-year-old children's developing perceptual skill with dialect, and suggest that they have a gradient representation of dialect variation.

The use of complex syntax was investigated in narrative language samples of older children and adolescents with Down syndrome (n = 24) and a group of typically developing children matched on mean length of utterance. Both groups used conjoined and subordinate sentence forms and did not differ significantly in either the proportion of utterances containing complex sentences or in the variety of complex sentence types used. The analysis of developmental patterns suggested a similar order of acquisition across groups. The findings indicate that syntactic development in individuals with Down syndrome continues into late adolescence and is not limited to simple syntax. This study does not support earlier findings of a critical period effect in syntactic development in Down syndrome based on age or syntactic complexity.

This study investigated the    which claims that children initially use verbal morphology to mark aspect and not tense. Experiment  tested  two-and three-year-old children 's comprehension of tense as it is marked in the auxiliary system using a sentence-to-scene matching task. Children were presented with multiple performances of the same event and asked where a character is V 'ing, was V 'ing and is gonna V. Results showed that even the two-year-old children could successfully understand tense in this experiment. Experiment  changed the information available in the scenes by varying whether or not the past-time event reached its completion point. Thirtysix two-, three-and four-year-old children participated. The results showed that the two-year-olds could only successfully understand past and present auxiliaries when past-time information in the scenes was coextensive with completion information in the scenes. This result suggests that these children may be making a grammatical aspect (perfective\imperfective) judgment and not a tense (past\present) judgment, or at least, that grammatical aspect influences tense interpretation for these children. Our intuitive notion of what information temporal expressions should encode corresponds pretty well to what the linguistic category of tense actually does encode, namely,  something happened. Locating an event in time is an important thing to do, and in fact, tense morphology is among [*] My thanks go to

Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the effect of accent on referential resolution in six- to eleven-year-old children and adults. In all age groups, a prominent accent facilitated the detection of a target in contrastive discourse sequences (pink cat → green cat), whereas it led to a garden path in non-contrastive sequences (pink rabbit → green monkey: the initial fixations were on rabbits). While the data indicate that children as young as age six immediately interpret contrastive accent, even the oldest child group showed delayed fixations compared to adults. We argue that the children's slower recovery from the garden path reflects the gradual development in cognitive flexibility that matures independently of general oculomotor control.