The Knowledge of Autism Questionnaire-UK: Development and Initial Psychometric Evaluation.

Tools to measure autism knowledge are needed to assess levels of understanding within particular groups of people and to evaluate whether awareness-raising campaigns or interventions lead to improvements in understanding. Several such measures are in circulation, but, to our knowledge, there are no psychometrically-validated questionnaires that assess contemporary autism knowledge suitable to the UK context. We aimed to produce a brief measure to assess between-respondent variability and within-respondent change over time. A pool of questionnaire items was developed and refined through a multi-stage iterative process involving autism experts and a lay sample. Attention was paid to face validity, clarity, consensus on correct responses, and appropriate difficulty levels. Initial validation data was obtained from a lay sample of 201 people. Difficulty and discrimination ability were assessed using item response theory and low-performing items were removed. Dimensionality was evaluated with exploratory factor analysis, which revealed a one-factor structure of the questionnaire. Further items were removed where they did not load strongly on their main factor. This process resulted in a final 14-item questionnaire called the Knowledge of Autism Questionnaire-UK. Internal consistency was satisfactory, and the final questionnaire was able to distinguish between parents of autistic people and those without an affiliation to autism. The KAQ-UK is a new, freely-available measure of autism knowledge that could be used to assess between-respondent variability and within-respondent change over time. Further evaluation and validation of its measurement properties are required.

The Competition Between Processing and Discourse-Pragmatic Factors in Children's and Adults' Production of Adverbial When-Clauses.

PURPOSE: This is the first study to investigate the combined effects of processing-based factors (i.e., clause length and clause order) and discourse-pragmatic factors (i.e., information structure) on children's and adults' production of adverbial when-clauses. METHOD: In a sentence repetition task, 16 three-year-old and 16 five-year-old children as well as 17 adults listened to and watched an animated story and then were asked to repeat what they had just heard and seen. Each story contained an adverbial when-clause and its main clause. The sentences were manipulated for their clause order, information structure, and clause length. RESULTS: Adults tended to change main-when clause orders to when-main in their repetitions, and they showed a strong preference for the given-new order of information. In contrast, 3-year-olds tended to change when-main clause orders to main-when, and they showed a preference for the new-given order of information. In addition, 3-year-olds tended to produce short-long clause orders irrespective of what they had heard, whereas adults produced both short-long and long-short orders in line with the input. In general, 5-year-olds were more adultlike in their production compared to 3-year-olds. CONCLUSIONS: Young children were strongly affected by processing-based factors in their production of complex sentences. They tended to order main and when-clauses in a way that requires less planning and processing load. However, they have not yet attained an adultlike sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic factors. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24422635.

The acquisition of English modal constructions: a corpus-based analysis.

The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4. We examined the influence on acquisition of input features including form-function mapping frequency and the number of functions a modal signifies, using innovative methodological controls for other aspects of the input (e.g., form frequency) and child characteristics (e.g., age as a proxy for socio-cognitive development). The children were more likely to produce the frequent modals and form-function mappings of their input but modals with fewer functions in caregiver speech did not promote acquisition of these forms. Our findings support usage-based approaches to language acquisition and demonstrate the importance of applying appropriate controls when investigating relationships between input and development.

Weak Vestibular Response in Persistent Developmental Stuttering.

Vibrational energy created at the larynx during speech will deflect vestibular mechanoreceptors in humans (Todd et al., 2008; Curthoys, 2017; Curthoys et al., 2019). Vestibular-evoked myogenic potential (VEMP), an indirect measure of vestibular function, was assessed in 15 participants who stutter, with a non-stutter control group of 15 participants paired on age and sex. VEMP amplitude was 8.5 dB smaller in the stutter group than the non-stutter group (p = 0.035, 95% CI [-0.9, -16.1], t = -2.1, d = -0.8, conditional R 2 = 0.88). The finding is subclinical as regards gravitoinertial function, and is interpreted with regard to speech-motor function in stuttering. There is overlap between brain areas receiving vestibular innervation, and brain areas identified as important in studies of persistent developmental stuttering. These include the auditory brainstem, cerebellar vermis, and the temporo-parietal junction. The finding supports the disruptive rhythm hypothesis (Howell et al., 1983; Howell, 2004) in which sensory inputs additional to own speech audition are fluency-enhancing when they coordinate with ongoing speech.

Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora.

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Early Prelinguistic Gesture Development and Its Relationship to Language Development.

Many Western industrialized nations have high levels of ethnic diversity but to date there are very few studies which investigate prelinguistic and early language development in infants from ethnic minority backgrounds. This study tracked the development of infant communicative gestures from 10 to 12 months (n = 59) in three culturally distinct groups in the United Kingdom and measured their relationship, along with maternal utterance frequency and responsiveness, to vocabulary development at 12 and 18 months. No significant differences were found in infant gesture development and maternal responsiveness across the groups, but relationships were identified between gesture, maternal responsiveness, and vocabulary development.

The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence-Picture Matching and Eye Movements.

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs ("The book that the boy is reading"). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., "Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing"). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5-6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., "where is the tractor that the car is following") to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short-term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1.

Interactions between givenness and clause order in children's processing of complex sentences.

Understanding complex sentences that contain multiple clauses referring to events in the world and the relations between them is an important development in children's language learning. A number of theoretical positions have suggested that factors like syntactic structure (clause order), iconicity (whether the order of clauses reflects the order of events), and givenness (whether information is shared between speakers) affect ease of comprehension. We tested these accounts by investigating how these factors interact in British English-speaking children's comprehension of complex sentences with adverbial clauses (after, before, because, if), while controlling for language level, working memory and inhibitory control. 92 children in three age groups (4, 5 and 8 years) and 17 adults completed a picture selection task. Participants heard an initial context sentence, followed by a two-clause sentence which varied in: (1) the order of the main and subordinate clause; (2) the order of given and new information; and (3) whether the given information occurred in the main or subordinate clause. Accuracy and response times were measured. Our results showed that given-before-new improves comprehension for four- and five-year-olds, but only when the given information is in the initial subordinate clause (e.g., "Sue crawls on the floor. Before she crawls on the floor, she hops up and down"). Temporal adverbials (after, before) were processed faster than causal adverbials (because, if). These effects were not found for the eight-year-olds, whose performance was more similar to that of the adults. Providing a context sentence also improved performance compared to presenting the test sentences in isolation. We conclude that existing accounts based on either ease of processing or information structure cannot fully account for these findings, and suggest a more integrated explanation which reflects children's developing language and literacy skills.

How the input shapes the acquisition of verb morphology: Elicited production and computational modelling in two highly inflected languages.

The aim of the present work was to develop a computational model of how children acquire inflectional morphology for marking person and number; one of the central challenges in language development. First, in order to establish which putative learning phenomena are sufficiently robust to constitute a target for modelling, we ran large-scale elicited production studies with native learners of Finnish (N = 77; 35-63 months) and Polish (N = 81; 35-59 months), using a novel method that, unlike previous studies, allows for elicitation of all six person/number forms in the paradigm (first, second and third person; singular and plural). We then proceeded to build and test a connectionist model of the acquisition of person/number marking which not only acquires near adult-like mastery of the system (including generalisation to unseen items), but also yields all of the key phenomena observed in the elicited-production studies; specifically, effects of token frequency and phonological neighbourhood density of the target form, and a pattern whereby errors generally reflect the replacement of low frequency targets by higher-frequency forms of the same verb, or forms with the same person/number as the target, but with a suffix from an inappropriate conjugation class. The findings demonstrate that acquisition of even highly complex systems of inflectional morphology can be accounted for by a theoretical model that assumes rote storage and phonological analogy, as opposed to formal symbolic rules.

Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children.

Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret some as compatible with all. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret some as not all, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term some in British English. Children's utterances containing some were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 (N = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with some (N = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce some. Their production of some implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire some, children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally, some is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations.

Children's Acquisition of the English Past-Tense: Evidence for a Single-Route Account From Novel Verb Production Data.

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, ) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, ) posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal "add -ed" rule that does not require analogy across regular past-tense forms. Children (aged 3-4; 5-6; 6-7; 9-10) saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake). Past-tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal "did yesterday." Collapsing across age group (since no interaction was observed), the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past-tense form (e.g., gezzed; chaked) was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single-route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past-tense is best explained by a single-route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules.

Iconicity affects children's comprehension of complex sentences: The role of semantics, clause order, input and individual differences.

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in children's speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive experimental study to date. We tested four-year-olds, five-year-olds and adults on four different adverbial clauses (before, after, because, if) to evaluate four different theoretical models (semantic, syntactic, frequency-based and capacity-constrained). 71 children and 10 adults (as controls) completed a forced-choice, picture-selection comprehension test, providing accuracy and response time data. Children also completed a battery of tests to assess their linguistic and general cognitive abilities. We found that children's comprehension was strongly influenced by semantic factors - the iconicity of the event-to-language mappings - and that their response times were influenced by the type of relation expressed by the connective (temporal vs. causal). Neither input frequency (frequency-based account), nor clause order (syntax account) or working memory (capacity-constrained account) provided a good fit to the data. Our findings thus contribute to the development of more sophisticated models of sentence processing. We conclude that such models must also take into account how children's emerging linguistic understanding interacts with developments in other cognitive domains such as their ability to construct mental models and reason flexibly about them.

Keeping it simple: the grammatical properties of shared book reading.

The positive effects of shared book reading on vocabulary and reading development are well attested (e.g., Bus, van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995). However, the role of shared book reading in grammatical development remains unclear. In this study, we conducted a construction-based analysis of caregivers' child-directed speech during shared book reading and toy play and compared the grammatical profile of the child-directed speech generated during the two activities. The findings indicate that (a) the child-directed speech generated by shared book reading contains significantly more grammatically rich constructions than child-directed speech generated by toy play, and (b) the grammatical profile of the book itself affects the grammatical profile of the child-directed speech generated by shared book reading.

Multiunit Sequences in First Language Acquisition.

Theoretical and empirical reasons suggest that children build their language not only out of individual words but also out of multiunit strings. These are the basis for the development of schemas containing slots. The slots are putative categories that build in abstraction while the schemas eventually connect to other schemas in terms of both meaning and form. Evidence comes from the nature of the input, the ways in which children construct novel utterances, the systematic errors that children make, and the computational modeling of children's grammars. However, much of this research is on English, which is unusual in its rigid word order and impoverished inflectional morphology. We summarize these results and explore their implications for languages with more flexible word order and/or much richer inflectional morphology.

How do language-specific characteristics affect the acquisition of different relative clause types? Evidence from Finnish.

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object, and two types of oblique relatives. No difference was found in the children's performance on different structures, including a lack of previously widely reported asymmetry between subject and object relatives. However, children's comprehension was modulated by animacy of the head referent. Study 3 tested children's production of the same RC structures using sentence repetition. Again we found no subject-object asymmetry. The pattern of results suggested that distributional frequency patterns and the relative complexity of the relativizer contribute to the difficulty associated with particular RC structures.

The Effects of Animacy and Syntax on Priming: A Developmental Study.

Sentence production relies on the activation of semantic information (e.g., noun animacy) and syntactic frames that specify an order for grammatical functions (e.g., subject before object). However, it is unclear whether these semantic and syntactic processes interact and if this might change over development. We thus examined the extent to which animacy-semantic role mappings in dative prime sentences and target scenes influences choice of syntactic structure (structural priming, analysis 1) and ordering of nouns as a function of animacy (animacy noun priming, analysis 2) in children and adults. One hundred forty-three participants (47 three year olds, 48 five year olds and 48 adults) alternated with the experimenter in describing animations. Animacy mappings for themes and goals were either prototypical or non-prototypical and either matched or mismatched across the experimenter's prime scenes and participants' target elicitation scenes. Prime sentences were either double-object datives (DOD e.g., the girl brought the monkey a ball) or prepositional datives (PD e.g., the girl brought the ball to the monkey), and occurred with either animate-inanimate or inanimate-animate, post-verbal noun order. Participants' target sentences were coded for syntactic form, and animacy noun order. All age groups showed a structural priming effect. A significant interaction between prime structure, prime animacy-semantic role mappings and prime-target match indicated that animacy could moderate structural priming in 3 year olds. However, animacy had no effect on structural priming in any other instance. Nevertheless, production of DOD structures was influenced by whether animacy-semantic role mappings in primes and target scenes matched or mismatched. We provide new evidence of animacy noun order priming effects in 3 and 5 year olds where there was prime-target match in animacy-semantic role mappings. Neither prime animacy noun ordering nor animacy-semantic role mappings influenced adults' target sentences. Our results demonstrate that animacy cues can affect speakers' word order independently of syntactic structure and also through interactions with syntax, although these processes are subject to developmental changes. We therefore, suggest that theories of structural priming, sentence production, linguistic representation and language acquisition all need to explicitly account for developmental changes in the role of semantic and syntactic information in sentence processing.

Can Infinitival to Omissions and Provisions Be Primed? An Experimental Investigation Into the Role of Constructional Competition in Infinitival to Omission Errors.

An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6-3;0 and 3;6-4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT-constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English-speaking children's infinitival to omission errors (e.g., *I want ___ jump now). In two between-participant groups, children either just heard or heard and repeated WANT-to, WANT-X, and control prime sentences after which to-infinitival constructions were elicited. We found that both age groups were primed, but in different ways. In the 2;6-3;0 year olds, WANT-to primes facilitated the provision of to in target utterances relative to the control contexts, but no significant effect was found for WANT-X primes. In the 3;6-4;0 year olds, both WANT-to and WANT-X primes showed a priming effect, namely WANT-to primes facilitated and WANT-X primes inhibited provision of to. We argue that these effects reflect developmental differences in the level of proficiency in and preference for the two constructions, and they are broadly consistent with "priming as implicit learning" accounts. The current study shows that (a) children as young as 2;6-3;0 years of age can be primed when they have only heard (not repeated) particular constructions, (b) children are acquiring at least two constructions for the matrix verb WANT, and (c) that these two WANT-constructions compete for production.

Children's understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks.

De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858-1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker's epistemic attitude toward that proposition. In the current study, English-speaking children of 3 and 4years of age (N=64) were asked to interpret propositional attitude constructions with a first- or third-person subject of the propositional attitude (e.g., "I think the sticker is in the red box" or "The cow thinks the sticker is in the red box", respectively). They were also assessed for an understanding of their own and others' false beliefs. We found that 4-year-olds showed a better understanding of both third-person propositional attitude constructions and false belief than their younger peers. No significant developmental differences were found for first-person propositional attitude constructions. The older children also showed a better understanding of their own false beliefs than of others' false beliefs. In addition, regression analyses suggest that the older children's comprehension of their own false beliefs was mainly related to their understanding of third-person propositional attitude constructions. These results indicate that we need to take a closer look at the propositional attitude constructions that are supposed to support children's false-belief reasoning. Children may come to understand their own and others' beliefs in different ways, and this may affect both their use and understanding of propositional attitude constructions and their performance in various types of false-belief tasks.

German Children's Use of Word Order and Case Marking to Interpret Simple and Complex Sentences: Testing Differences Between Constructions and Lexical Items.

Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., the dog chased the cat). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., that's the dog that chased the cat) (Bates, Devescovi, & D'Amico, 1999). We used a pointing paradigm to test German-speaking 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old children's sensitivity to case marking and word order in their interpretation of simple transitives and transitive RCs. In Experiment 1, case marking was ambiguous. The only cue available was word order. In Experiment 2, case was marked on lexical NPs or demonstrative pronouns. In Experiment 3, case was marked on lexical NPs or personal pronouns. Whereas the younger children mainly followed word order, the older children were more likely to base their interpretations on the more reliable case-marking cue. In most cases, children from both age groups were more likely to use these cues in their interpretation of simple transitives than in their interpretation of transitive RCs. Finally, children paid more attention to nominative case when it was marked on first-person personal pronouns than when it was marked on third-person lexical NPs or demonstrative pronouns, such as der Löwe 'the-NOM lion' or der 'he-NOM.' They were able to successfully integrate this case-marking cue in their sentence processing even when it appeared late in the sentence. We discuss four potential reasons for these differences across development, constructions, and lexical items. (1) Older children are relatively more sensitive to cue reliability. (2) Word order is more reliable in simple transitives than in transitive RCs. (3) The processing of case marking might initially be item-specific. (4) The processing of case marking might depend on its saliency and position in the sentence.

Converging and competing cues in the acquisition of syntactic structures: the conjoined agent intransitive.

In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting conjoined agent intransitives. The same children, however, do not appear to rely exclusively on the number of nouns as a cue to structure meaning. The pattern of results indicates that children are processing a number of cues when inferring the meaning of the conjoined agent intransitive. These cues appear to be in competition with each other and the cue that receives the most activation is used to infer the meaning of the construction. Critically, these studies suggest that children's knowledge of syntactic structures forms a network of organization, such that knowledge of one structure can impact on interpretation of other structures.