First Language

Altogether 329 children participated in four longitudinal studies of specific and general language performance cumulatively from 1;1 to 6;10. Data were drawn from age-appropriate maternal questionnaires, maternal interviews, teacher reports, experimenter assessments and transcripts of children’s own spontaneous speech. Language performance at each age and stability of individual differences across age in girls and boys were assessed separately and together. Across age, including the important transition from preschool to school, across multiple tests at each age and across multiple reporters, children showed moderate to strong stability of individual differences; girls and boys alike were stable. In the second through fifth years, but not before or after, girls consistently outperformed boys in multiple specific and general measures of language.

The infinitive productions of eight 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) on an elicited production task were compared with the infinitive productions of 25 3- to 5-year-old children with normally-developing language (NL). The basic infinitive structure itself did not seem to be a problem for these children since all eight of the children with SLI produced infinitival complements with at least five different main verbs. However, other aspects of infinitive sentences which must be learned as a lexical property of specific verbs appeared to present more difficulty for some of the children with SLI. Individual children with SLI showed limited or no subcategorization for ditransitivity (production of both an NP and an infinitival complement) or for infinitives with a lexical complement subject. In contrast to previous reports, only one of the children with SLI omitted the infinitive marker to more than once. Reference errors were consistent with what has previously been reported for NL children.

Children’s interest in shared reading (14 and 24 months) and its relation to their later language and letter knowledge (age 3;6) were investigated in a follow-up study. The participants were 156 children and their mothers. Half of these children (N = 74) came from families where one or both of the parents were diagnosed as reading disabled (the at-risk group), the other half (N = 82) belonged to the control group. The results revealed that children with and without familial risk for reading difficulties did not differ from each other in the interest they showed towards shared reading. Interestingly, only children in the control group appeared to benefit from shared reading interactions in their later language and letter knowledge.

This study investigated the relationships of children’s behavioural adjustment, temperamental approach tendencies and empathy to their ability to produce and comprehend one aspect of politeness (namely level of directness) in requests, in a sample of 100 ten-and-a-half-year-old children from the Australian Temperament Project (ATP) population. The study showed that high levels of anxious fearful behaviour problems increased the likelihood of producing less direct requests to more powerful others while high levels of approaching temperament increased the likelihood of producing less direct requests to more distant others. High levels of hostile aggressive behaviour problems increased the likelihood of producing direct requests to more distant others. By comparison high levels of approaching temperament, empathy and social anxiety increased the likelihood of children judging more direct requests to more powerful others to be effective. The findings supported the view that individual differences are related to children’s use of directness in response to variation in the social context of request situations.