First Language

Parental reports have been shown to be an informative, cost-effective, and non-invasive method of assessing children’s early communicative and language development (up to the age of 3 years). However, less is known about their applicability in older preschool children after the age of three. The main aim of this study was to present the validation process of the Slovenian version of the Communicative Development Inventories (CDI-III), which is based on the Swedish and Croatian versions. The study was conducted on a sample of 337 parents whose children were aged between 2;6 and 4;0. The results indicate a significant intercorrelation between all subsections of the scale and a clear trend of progress related to age. Among the demographic factors, mother’s education was found to have a significant influence on children’s scores on the Grammar and Metalinguistic Awareness subscales. Gender and the presence of siblings did not appear to be a significant factor. In addition, scores on the language subscales (Vocabulary, Grammar, Metalinguistic Awareness) correlated significantly with scores in the Comprehension and Production Scales of the New Reynell Developmental Language Scale. The study confirms that the Slovenian version of the CDI-III is a valid and psychometrically suitable instrument for further research into language development in Slovenian.

The present study experimentally investigates the role of epistemic vigilance in children’s comprehension of verbal irony. We tested 186 children aged from 4/5 to 7/8 using an offline irony comprehension task and an epistemic vigilance task. In the vigilance task, we assessed children’s tendency to trust reliable informants and mistrust unreliable ones. The same informants appeared in the irony task as the target of the ironical remarks, allowing us to examine whether prior information about their reliability influenced irony interpretation. Our findings indicate that children’s epistemic vigilance significantly predicted irony comprehension when irony was directed at an unreliable target. These results provide empirical support for the hypothesis that epistemic vigilance enhances understanding of the dissociative, critical stance expressed by the ironical speaker.

There is a need for instruments that can assess skills at an early age and that are valid on an international level to support large-scale multicultural research of child development. The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) was developed in the United States to measure expressive communication in the early years, supporting early intervention practitioners and other professionals. It is designed to be applied in any context and in any language, making it applicable internationally. A study involving 480 Portuguese infants and toddlers (aged 6–42 months) that used the ECI provided an opportunity to explore the development of expressive communication using the ECI in a language other than English and in a novel cultural context. The results confirmed a continuum of communication growth and showed similarities with the trajectories found in the U.S. and Australian populations, where the ECI is widely used, for example, to measure communication and monitor intervention in early childhood. Implications for future studies and contributions to theory and practice provided by these new cross-cultural data on ECI are discussed.

Hart and Risley claimed the existence of an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and oral language competence, having found that children from lower SES backgrounds presented with less-developed vocabulary than children from higher SES backgrounds. The purpose of this study was to examine the accuracy and generalisability of Hart and Risley’s original finding by quantifying the association between SES and oral vocabulary test scores through systematic review and meta-analysis. Papers including data collected between 2012 and 2022 and examining the association between SES and oral vocabulary test scores through either a correlational or group comparison design were considered for inclusion. Following a database search for peer-reviewed articles, 3055 articles were subjected to title and abstract screening, and 209 were retrieved for full-text screening. In total, 17 relevant studies were identified through systematic review, with nine countries and seven languages represented. The meta-analysis of correlation coefficients for the association between SES and oral vocabulary included 10 studies, drawing upon the data of 9742 children, and yielded a combined positive effect size of approximately moderate magnitude (r = .27). The meta-analysis of standardised mean differences in oral vocabulary between lower and higher SES groups included seven studies, drawing upon the data of 1491 children and yielded a statistically significant combined effect size of strong magnitude (g = −0.93) in favour of higher SES groups. These findings confirm the existence of a substantial positive association between SES and oral vocabulary test scores evident in modern societies internationally. The importance of interpreting these results precisely is emphasised.

This longitudinal study examined how sign duration in Israeli Sign Language infant-directed input is shaped by linguistic and developmental factors. Two Deaf mothers were video-recorded interacting naturally with their hearing children between 10 and 36 months of age. Sign duration decreased with child age, reflecting a shift from pedagogically enriched to more compact input. Iconic signs were elongated relative to non-iconic signs, particularly at younger ages, suggesting a perceptual scaffolding function. Lexical category was the strongest predictor: object and attribute signs were consistently produced with longer durations than action or function signs. Lexical frequency had no significant effect on sign duration. Qualitative observations identified prosodic strategies—such as final holds and enlarged movement—to enhance visual salience during early input. These findings underscore how Deaf caregivers adapt their signing to the child’s developmental level, using prosodic modulation informed by iconic and lexical features. Sign duration thus emerges as a dynamic and communicatively motivated feature of infant-directed signing, supporting early language acquisition in the visual-manual modality.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) present with unexplained difficulties with both expressive and receptive language. A key conundrum is why their prognoses are often poorer than children with evidenced brain lesions. How can children with early focal lesions acquire language so well compared with children with DLD who do not present with gross neurological abnormalities? A possibility raised by Dell and Chang in 2013 is that learning in DLD is fundamentally derailed by an exemplar-based learning style. Such a process has been robustly demonstrated in studies of artificial neural networks. This theoretical article discusses exemplar theory, the role exemplars may play in language development, and surveys evidence suggesting an exemplar-based learning style in DLD. It concludes that this provides a plausible new approach to both explaining the condition and designing new therapies.

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.

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.

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.