Melita Kovačević

Differences between Girls and Boys in Emerging Language Skills: Evidence from 10 Language Communities.

The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children from 10 non-English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with adapted versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08 to 2.06. The results showed that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early communicative gestures, in productive vocabulary, and in combining words. The difference increased with age. Boys were not found to be more variable than girls. Despite extensive variation in language skills between language communities, the difference between girls and boys remained. This suggests that the difference is caused by robust factors that do not change between language communities.

Some insights into specific language impairment in Croatian

This paper presents a short-term longitudinal study of specific language impairment (SLI) in school children and tries to give a detailed linguistic and non-linguistic description of the phenomenon. Two groups of elementary school children, grade 1 to 4, age 7 to 10, were tested. The first group consisted of children with SLI (n = 61) and the control group consisted of children with no language difficulties (n = 61). There follows a detailed presentation of two language variables (plural/dual formation and detection and correction of incorrect inflections). The results obtained are discussed. The conclusion which could be drawn is that children with SLI show more problems in knowledge of language and its usage, though they are not characterized by any kind of general language deficiency.

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like ‘who’ or a complex one like ‘which princess’, and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children’s performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children’s understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both ‘who’ and ‘which’, and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

Resolution of anaphoric expressions in children and adults: evidence from eye movements

This eye–tracking study uses the visual world paradigm to explore the anaphora resolution strategies in children and adults. The pro–drop feature of Croatian was used to indicate the switch in topic while visual cues on the accompanying pictures provided different contexts. The results suggest that both children and adults rely more on visual cues, but when these cues are not available, the two groups behave differently. Adults tend to choose the Agent as the antecedent, while children’s behaviour is unclear as they perform at chance. These results are in line with similar studies in Italian and Spanish regarding the pro–drop feature as an indicator of the change in topic, as well as with French and Greek studies regarding developmental changes in the reliance on linguistic