Infants' pointing at nine months is associated with maternal sensitivity but not vocabulary.

Infants often start pointing toward the end of their first year of life. Pointing shows a strong link to language, perhaps because parents label what infants point to. In the present study, we tested whether 9-month-olds' pointing was related to parental sensitivity and concurrent and subsequent vocabulary scores. Observations were made of 88 9-month-old infants in free-play situations with their mothers. Less than half the infants produced at least one index-finger point. The mothers' reactions to their infants' behaviour were coded for sensitivity. The mothers of the infants who pointed were less directing and responded more contingently than the mothers of the infants who did not point. However, there was no difference in vocabulary scores of pointers and non-pointers, either concurrently or at 12 and 18 months of age. These results could mean that parents' reactions play an important role in shaping pointing to be communicative.

Explaining First Language Acquisition in Terms of Basic Behavioral Processes: Introduction to the Special Section.

This special section of Perspectives on Behavior Science follows up on a virtual panel discussion on the role of operant and Pavlovian processes in children's language learning. We present four articles, including two contributed by panelists, that illustrate the explanatory power of operant conditioning processes in the study of language.

Mental health in Canadian children and adolescents during COVID-19 pandemic: the role of personality and, coping and stress responses.

In December 2019, the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic first emerged in China and quickly spread to other countries. Previous studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequences have negatively impacted the mental health of adults. Individual differences such as personality could contribute to mental health. Furthermore, coping and responses to stress may affect an individual's response to the pandemic. In the past, studies have only investigated this relationship in adults. In the current study, we examine how personality traits (using the Five-Factor Model as our framework) and Coping and Response to COVID-19 stress are related to the mental health of Canadian children and adolescents during the pandemic. Using parent reports of 100 preschoolers and 607 6-18-year-old children, we performed multiple regression analysis to explore how personality traits predict the effects of COVID-19 on mental health. The results showed that personality traits are associated with the mental health of Canadian youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. In preschoolers, Neuroticism and Agreeableness predicted the most mental health problems, and in 6-18-year-old children, Extraversion negatively predicted the most mental health problems. Also, Openness to Experience was the weakest predictor of mental health status in Canadian youth. These findings could be useful in understanding children's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and could assist public health services delivering mental health services specifically tailored to children's personalities during and after this pandemic.

Monolingual and bilingual children's production of complex syntactic structures.

Typically-developing bilingual children often score lower than monolingual peers of the same age on standardized measures; however, research has shown that when assessed in more natural discourse contexts, bilinguals can perform similar to age-matched monolinguals in some language subdomains. This study investigated complex syntax production in simultaneous French-English bilingual children and monolingual age-matched peers, using structured and spontaneous measures. Surprisingly, the bilinguals scored higher than the monolinguals on the structured task. There was no difference between groups on the spontaneous measure; however, predictors of complex syntax production differed by language groups and by tasks. Contrary to other language subdomains showing bilingual English development as protracted relative to monolingual peers, these results point to a relative strength of complex syntax acquisition among simultaneous bilingual children. Differences in exposure relative to monolingual children may be less pronounced in syntax, in part because bilinguals can benefit from syntactic knowledge in their other language.

The Directionality of the Relationship Between Executive Functions and Language Skills: A Literature Review.

It has been demonstrated that executive functions play a significant role in different aspects of the development of children. Development of language is also one of the most important accomplishments of the preschool years, and it has been linked to many outcomes in life. Despite substantial research demonstrating the association between executive function and language development in childhood, only a handful of studies have examined the direction of the developmental pathways between EF skills and language skills, therefore little is known about how these two constructs are connected. In this review paper, we discuss three possible directional relationships between EFs and language development throughout childhood. First, we discuss how EF might affect language functioning. Next, we discuss how language functioning might affect EF. Lastly, we consider other possible relationships between EF and language. Given that children with better EF and language skills are more likely to succeed in educational settings and demonstrate greater social-emotional competencies, investigating the relationship between EF and language in the preschool period provides insight into mechanisms that have not been extensively studied. Furthermore, it could create new opportunities for designing effective and efficient interventions aimed at addressing EF and language deficits during the preschool period which could in turn influence later development.

How bilinguals refer to Mandarin throwing actions in English.

Aims and Objectives: In the present study, we tested how Mandarin-English bilinguals choose English words to refer to prototypical Mandarin throwing actions. Languages differ in how they refer to events. In Mandarin and English, words for throwing actions differ notably on a variety of dimensions so there are few perfect translation equivalents. In previous studies, when faced with the challenge of how to speak about such events, bilinguals sometimes use language-specific ways in each language, sometimes show convergence, sometimes use more general terms, and there are times when they can be quite creative. Design/Methodology: We showed video clips of six prototypical Mandarin throwing actions (corresponding to reng , diu , pao , tóu , shuai , shuǎi ) to Mandarin-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. Participants labeled the actions and chose the English word most closely corresponding to the action. The bilinguals did the same in Mandarin. Findings/Conclusion: The results showed that the bilinguals chose many of the same words in English as English monolinguals did. However, the bilinguals differed from the monolinguals in two ways: (1) they tended to choose more different responses and (2) they referred to diu actions most often as throw rather than lob as the monolinguals did. Originality: These results suggest that bilinguals use a variety of strategies to refer to the not-easily-translatable.

English Speakers' Implicit Gender Concepts Influence Their Processing of French Grammatical Gender: Evidence for Semantically Mediated Cross-Linguistic Influence.

Second language (L2) learners often show influence from their first language (L1) in all domains of language. This cross-linguistic influence could, in some cases, be mediated by semantics. The purpose of the present study was to test whether implicit English gender connotations affect L1 English speakers' judgments of the L2 French gender of objects. We hypothesized that gender estimates derived from word embedding models that measure similarity of word contexts in English would affect accuracy and response time on grammatical gender (GG) decision in L2 French. L2 French learners were asked to identify the GG of French words estimated to be either congruent or incongruent with the implicit gender in English. The results showed that they were more accurate with words that were congruent with English gender connotations than words that were incongruent, suggesting that English gender connotations can influence grammatical judgments in French. Response times showed the same pattern. The results are consistent with semantics-mediated cross-linguistic influence.

Nine-month old infants' hand preference shows no link to concurrent or later vocabulary.

Previous studies have shown a link between language abilities and right hand preference (RHP) for both object manipulation and pointing between 10 and 18 months of age. For infants, RHP can still be unstable. The purpose of the present study was to test whether the link between vocabulary and RHP exists among 9-month-old infants. The study included 88 infants who were observed in videotaped free-play interactions with their mothers at 9 months of age. The infants' hand preference was coded for touching objects and pointing. The children's vocabulary was measured at 9, 12, and 18 months of age. The results showed a small and significant RHP for touching objects and no significant RHP for pointing. The degree of RHP was not correlated with vocabulary scores at any age. One interpretation of these results is that, for the infants in this study, the lateralization for motor abilities was still stabilizing and therefore showed no relationship with their vocabulary. If so, this result is consistent with the argument that language lateralization builds on the lateralization for skilled and/or communicative movement.

Absence of a bilingual cognitive flexibility advantage: A replication study in preschoolers.

Some studies have found a bilingual advantage in children's executive function and some failed to find a bilingual advantage. For example, the results of a previous study by Bialystok & Martin (2004) indicated that Chinese-English bilingual preschool children outperformed English monolingual children in solving the dimensional change card sort (DCCS). The goal of our study was to replicate this study using the same dimensional change card sort task. We also tested our participants on vocabulary and digit span. Our participants were 40 English monolingual and 40 Mandarin-English bilingual children and were within the same age range as the children in Bialystok & Martin's (2004) study. Our results showed no difference between bilinguals and monolinguals. Both groups of children in the present study performed better than those in Bialystok and Martin (2004), but the bigger difference was between the two groups of monolinguals. These results suggest that it could be important to attend to monolingual children's performance, in addition to bilinguals', when testing for a bilingual advantage. Our replication study is important because it helps with clarifying the validity of studies finding a bilingual advantage and to help future researchers know whether to build on their findings or not.

Hand preference in referential gestures: Relationships to accessing words for speaking in monolingual and bilingual children.

INTRODUCTION: Infants' right-hand preference for pointing is associated with higher vocabulary. It is not clear whether the link between right-hand preference for gesturing and language persists into the preschool years. The primary purpose of the present study was to test whether preschool children's hand preference for referential gestures was associated with their language abilities. Secondarily, we predicted that the children's right-hand preference would be negatively associated with their visuospatial abilities. We also predicted that monolingual children would show a strong right-hand preference while bilinguals might show a reduced right-hand preference. METHODS: Monolingual and bilingual children between the ages of four and six years did a storytelling task. Their referential gestures were coded for hand use (right, left, both). We measured language skills (receptive vocabulary, semantic fluency). RESULTS: We found no difference between bilinguals and monolinguals on hand preference. Semantic fluency was a positive predictor and vocabulary a negative predictor of right-hand preference. Children's visuospatial abilities were not a predictor of right-hand preference. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that right-hand preference may help children select semantically appropriate words out of their existing vocabulary. In other words, this preference may be related to children's construction of the message that they would like to produce. The association between hand preference and language skills persists into the preschool years.

How personality traits of neuroticism and extroversion predict the effects of the COVID-19 on the mental health of Canadians.

The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) epidemic was first detected in China in December 2019 and spread to other countries fast. Some studies have found that COVID-19 pandemic has had adverse mental health consequences. Individual differences such as personality could contribute to people's behaviors during a pandemic. In the current study, we examine how personality traits of neuroticism and extroversion (using the Five-Factor Model as our framework) are related to the mental health of Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from an online survey with 1096 responses, this study performed multiple regression analysis to explore how personality traits of neuroticism and extroversion predict the effects of COVID-19 on the mental health of Canadians. The results showed that personality traits of neuroticism and extroversion are associated with the current mental health of Canadians during COVID-19 pandemic, with extroversion positively related to mental health and neuroticism negatively related to it. Results contribute to the management of individual responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and could help public health services provide personality-appropriate mental health services during this pandemic.

"This is a Titanic song": the effect of familiarity on children's learning affective meaning in music.

Usage-based theories of language acquisition are thought to rely on domain-general learning mechanisms, such as mastering familiar routines by rote before generalizing to novel unfamiliar instances. If so, then the role of familiarity should extend to non-linguistic domains, like music. The purpose of the present study was to test the role of familiarity in children's learning of affective meaning of music. Music carries an affective meaning that is relayed through its elements, such as mode, rhythm, and tempo. The previous research has found differences between children and adults in their understanding of music's affective meaning, suggesting that this meaning is learned. We predicted that children would initially learn the affective meaning of familiar musical pieces before generalizing to unfamiliar pieces. Children between 3 and 5 years of age heard 16 musical segments, one for each emotion (i.e., anger, sadness, and happiness), and their accuracy in pairing music-emotion was measured. For younger children, their familiarity with the piece was positively associated with their accuracy. These results suggest that familiarity plays a role in learning affective meaning in music, providing support for the claim that this learning mechanism is domain-general.

Developing Abstract Representations of Passives: Evidence From Bilingual Children's Interpretation of Passive Constructions.

According to usage-based theories, children initially acquire surface-level constructions and then abstract representations. If so, bilingual children might show lags relative to monolingual children early in acquisition, but not later on, once they rely on abstract representations. We tested this prediction with comprehension of passives in 3- to 6-year-old children: French-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. As predicted, younger bilingual children tended to be less accurate than monolingual children. In contrast, the older bilingual children scored equivalently to monolinguals, despite less exposure to English. When the children made errors, the bilingual children were more likely to interpret the subject as the agent of the action than the monolingual children. These results are consistent with the argument that children develop increasingly abstract representations of linguistic constructions with usage. They further suggest that bilingual children might catch up with monolingual through use of selective attention and/or a semantic bias.

Pantomime (Not Silent Gesture) in Multimodal Communication: Evidence From Children's Narratives.

Pantomime has long been considered distinct from co-speech gesture. It has therefore been argued that pantomime cannot be part of gesture-speech integration. We examine pantomime as distinct from silent gesture, focusing on non-co-speech gestures that occur in the midst of children's spoken narratives. We propose that gestures with features of pantomime are an infrequent but meaningful component of a multimodal communicative strategy. We examined spontaneous non-co-speech representational gesture production in the narratives of 30 monolingual English-speaking children between the ages of 8- and 11-years. We compared the use of co-speech and non-co-speech gestures in both autobiographical and fictional narratives and examined viewpoint and the use of non-manual articulators, as well as the length of responses and narrative quality. The use of non-co-speech gestures was associated with longer narratives of equal or higher quality than those using only co-speech gestures. Non-co-speech gestures were most likely to adopt character-viewpoint and use non-manual articulators. The present study supports a deeper understanding of the term pantomime and its multimodal use by children in the integration of speech and gesture.

Towards a reliable measure of motor working memory: revisiting Wu and Coulson's (2014) movement span task.

Some researchers have argued that motor working memory is relatively independent from visuospatial working memory and underlies the learning and processing of motor tasks, like gesture comprehension. To allow systematic testing of these claims, Wu & Coulson 2014 Psychol. Sci. 26, 1717-1727. (doi:10.1177/0956797615597671) proposed a novel measure of motor working memory, the movement span task. Some studies have reported that the movement span task has a high degree of validity. The purpose of the present study was to attempt to replicate Wu & Coulson 2014 Psychol. Sci. 26, 1717-1727. (doi:10.1177/0956797615597671) in the following ways: (1) the high correlation between movement span and movement recall scores and (2) the lack of correlation between the movement span task on the one hand and visuospatial and verbal working memory on the other. In the present study, we found a high correlation between the movement span and recall scores as well as most measures of visuospatial memory. However, the size of these correlations was similar to that reported by Wu and Coulson, suggesting that the significance may be related to sample size. In other words, motor working memory may be weakly related to visuospatial memory. By contrast, there were weak correlations between the movement span task and verbal memory. In sum, we found the same pattern of results observed by Wu & Coulson 2014, 1717-1727. (doi:10.1177/0956797615597671).

Why jumped is so difficult: tense/aspect marking in Mandarin-English bilingual children.

Learning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese-English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of -ed as an aspect marker of completion, like the Mandarin -le. Mandarin-English bilingual children and age-matched monolinguals did a cartoon retell task. The verbs used in the stories were coded for accuracy in English, telicity, and suppliance of -ed or -le. The results were consistent with morphophonological transfer: the bilingual children were more accurate with irregular past forms in English than regular forms. The results were also consistent with the bilingual children's interpretation of -ed as an aspect marker: most of their production of -ed was on telic verbs. We discuss possible reasons for the children's interpretation of -ed as an aspect marker.

When knowing only one word for "car" leads to weak application of mutual exclusivity.

From a very young age, monolingual children assume their language has no synonyms, or use the principle of mutual exclusivity (only one label per object). In contrast, bilingual children often accept more novel synonyms than monolinguals. One possible explanation for this difference is the lexicon structure hypothesis: having synonyms (across languages) in the lexicon reduces adherence to mutual exclusivity. The purpose of this study is to test the lexicon structure hypothesis by comparing three- to five-year-old children who speak either Canadian French or English. Canadian French allows more synonyms than English. French-speaking children should therefore accept more novel synonyms than English-speaking children. The children did a disambiguation task, choosing whether a familiar or an unfamiliar object was the referent of a novel word (e.g., moli). Surprisingly, the French-speaking children accepted significantly fewer novel synonyms than English-speaking children. However, they accepted the most synonyms for objects that had synonyms in French but they did not know both synonyms. These results support a modified version of the lexicon structure hypothesis, one that accounts for children's weak access to synonyms.

A Doctor's Foreign Accent Affects Perceptions of Competence.

Many doctors work or train in foreign countries and speak with a foreign accent. People sometimes assume that a person who speaks with a foreign accent possesses negative traits and personality characteristics. The purpose of this study is to test if doctors who speak with a foreign accent are perceived as less competent than doctors who speak with a standard accent. Both Caucasian Canadian and Chinese Canadian undergraduates rated the competence of a doctor speaking English with either a standard Canadian accent or a Chinese accent. The doctor was delivering either good or bad news about the patient's cholesterol levels or cancer. Previous research has shown that when reminded of death, participants favor in-group members. We found that the Chinese-accented doctor's competence was judged more negatively than the standard Canadian accented doctor by all participants. Both doctors were deemed less competent when delivering bad news than good news. These results suggest that foreign-accented doctors face biases about their competence from their patients.

How many fingers am I holding up? The answer depends on children's language background.

Monolingual English-speaking preschool children tend to process number gestures as unanalyzed wholes rather than use the one-to-one (finger-to-quantity) correspondence. By school age, however, children can use the one-to-one correspondence. The purpose of the present studies was to test whether children learn one-to-one correspondence through exposure to a variety of finger configurations to convey a single quantity. In Study 1, we compared children with exposure to multiple one-to-one configurations, that is, French-English and German-English bilingual children, to English monolingual children who see consistent representations. As predicted, the bilingual children performed better in interpreting unconventional number gestures. In Study 2, we compared Chinese-English bilingual children who knew arbitrary one-handed Chinese numbers gestures for quantities 6-10 to Chinese-English bilingual children who did not know these gestures, as well as to monolingual English speakers. Chinese-English bilinguals who knew the arbitrary gestures were more likely to interpret unconventional gestures arbitrarily (i.e., influenced by the written and/or Chinese gesture forms). These children did not differ from English monolinguals in the interpretation of unconventional gestures. These results are consistent with the argument that children can become sensitive to the one-to-one correspondence in number gestures with exposure to multiple configurations for the same quantity.

The acquisition of English possessives by a bilingual child: Do input and usage frequency matter?

Previous research in child language shows that many aspects of language acquisition are frequency-linked. This study tests whether input or usage frequency predicts the order of acquisition and accuracy of a bilingual Greek-English child's English possessives. The child was followed longitudinally from age 2;6 to 3;11. Order of acquisition was comparable to that of same-aged monolingual children. The child's usage frequency and order of acquisition were highly correlated with input frequency, while her accuracy was not. We argue that the child's already-acquired Greek possessives facilitated acquisition of English possessives, even though the child's English input and usage frequencies were lower than in monolingual English children.