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The linguistic interdependence hypothesis posits the existence of language features common to different languages. This set of characteristics, known as Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP), is a powerful facilitating agent in second language acquisition. Fluid intelligence (Gf), on the other hand, is the construct that encompasses those cognitive resources devoted to general learning, and its involvement in second language acquisition is unproven. The aim of this study is to determine the direct and interactive effect of L1 knowledge and Gf on second language acquisition in language immersion learners across different linguistic domains. The study analyzed the proficiency of 131 Romanian students in Spanish and Catalan, the official languages of Catalonia. Mixed-effects regression models were used to analyze lexical, morphosyntactic, and orthographic aspects. The results were obtained using mixed-effects regression models, revealing a particularly noticeable interdependence effect in lexical, morphosyntactic, and orthographic aspects, with differences between Catalan and Spanish. Furthermore, Gf had an impact on the morphosyntactic component with similar intensity for both languages but did not moderate the interdependence effect. The study discusses the possible causes of these effects, as well as their psycho-pedagogical consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While children with typical language development may capitalize on general language skills to grasp the content of others' minds, those with challenges in mind-reading could rather rely more specifically on complementation structures. However, most studies investigating mind-reading have focused on first-order false-belief reasoning, while much less is known about secondorder false-belief, particularly for children that may present language difficulties, such as children with hearing impairment. This study aims to explore the link between language development and second-order false-belief in hearingimpaired children compared to their hearing counterparts. It seeks to ascertain whether mastering second-order false-belief requires the comprehension of complements or other language skills in hearing-impaired children, and if a distinct pattern emerges in their hearing peers. Children with hearing-impairment (n = 22) and a chronological age-matched control group (n = 25), ages 8-12, were administered a second-order false-belief task (carefully avoiding use of complements and highly visual). Alongside this, they completed assessments of expressive vocabulary, receptive and expressive syntax, recalling sentences, and a recursive sentential complements task. Correlational analysis revealed that in the control group only productive syntax was related to performance on the second-order false-belief task, while in the hearing-impaired group, expressive vocabulary, recalling sentences and sentential complements were related to second-order false-belief performance. These results show that vocabulary, recursive complements and expressive syntax are particularly important aspects for second-order false-belief success in children with hearing-impairment as compared to their hearing peers. These results shed light on how language and second-order false-belief understanding are related in their development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Previous literature suggests that children with Down syndrome (DS) have difficulties in cognitive and affective components of Theory of Mind (ToM). However, the nature of the distinction between cognitive and affective ToM has not yet been addressed in depth in this population. Aims This work is aimed at studying the cognitive and affective ToM in children with DS. Methods and Procedures Cognitive ToM tasks (first-order false belief) and affective ToM tasks (Test of Emotion Comprehension) were administered to 30 children with DS (aged from 4 to 12 years) and to 60 typically developing (TD) children (aged from 2 to 12 years). TD children were divided into 2 groups: a Language control group and a Chronological age control group. Results Results suggest that children with DS have difficulty with both the cognitive and affective ToM components, even when compared to the language control group. In contrast to children with typical development, children with DS have a better performance in affective ToM. Conclusions We discuss our results in the light of prior studies describing the difficulties of children with DS in ToM tasks and the role of language in ToM development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language acquisition is influenced by the quality and quantity of input that language learners receive. In particular, early language development has been said to rely on the acoustic speech stream, as well as on language-related visual information, such as the cues provided by the mouth of interlocutors. Furthermore, children's expressive language skills are also influenced by the variability of interlocutors that provided the input. The COVID-19 pandemic has offered an unprecedented opportunity to explore the way these input factors affect language development. On the one hand, the pervasive use of masks diminishes the quality of speech, while it also reduces visual cues to language. On the other hand, lockdowns and restrictions regarding social gatherings have considerably limited the amount of interlocutor variability in children's input. The present study aims at analyzing the effects of the pandemic measures against COVID-19 on early language development. To this end, 41 children born in 2019 and 2020 were compared with 41 children born before 2012 using the Catalan adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs). Results do not show significant differences in vocabulary between pre- and post-Covid children, although there is a tendency for children with lower vocabulary levels to be in the post-Covid group. Furthermore, a relationship was found between interlocutor variability and participants' vocabulary, indicating that those participants with fewer opportunities for socio-communicative diversity showed lower expressive vocabulary scores. These results reinforce other recent findings regarding input factors and their impact on early language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heritage Language Instruction (HLI) is a resource used in many immigration-receiving countries that allows students with an immigrant background to continue to be in contact with their Heritage Language (HL). However, many of the psycholinguistic effects of this instruction are still unknown. This study aims to provide an in-depth view of the effects of HLI on the development of the HL and the languages of the host country. For this purpose, the sample consisted of 108 students (20 HL learners, 88 controls) of Romanian origin who had emigrated to Catalonia. Their language skills in the phonetic, orthographic, morphosyntactic, lexical, and semantic domains were analysed using linear regression statistics and covariance analysis. The results showed that HLI exerted a mitigating effect on HL attrition, as well as a significant improvement of the linguistic competencies in the autochthonous languages. These results indicate that HLI is an effective tool in the psycholinguistic development of immigrant students, capable of facilitating their academic and social performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Although 3‐year‐old children sometimes simulate emotions to adapt to social norms, we do not know if even younger children can pretend emotions in playful contexts. The present study investigated (1) what emotions infants of 1–2 years old are capable of pretending and (2) the possible role of language and symbolic play in the ability to pretend emotions. The sample included 69 infants aged 18 to 31 months and their parents. Infants were administrated the Test of Pretend Play, and their parents responded to the MacArthur‐Bates CDI‐II inventory, part of the MacArthur‐Bates CDI‐I, and a questionnaire about the expression of pretend emotions. Results suggest that very young children simulate emotions. Furthermore, children's simulation of emotions was related to both symbolic play and language. Specifically, the ability to label emotions was linked to the ability to simulate them. The role of language and symbolic play in the development of the capacity to express and understand pretend emotions is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to further understand children's capacity to identify and reason about pretend emotions by analyzing which sources of information they take into account when interpreting emotions simulated in pretend play contexts. A total of 79 children aged 3 to 8 participated in the final sample of the study. They were divided into the young group (ages 3 to 5) and the older group (6 to 8). The children were administered a facial emotion recognition task, a pretend emotions task, and a non-verbal cognitive ability test. In the pretend emotions task, the children were asked whether the protagonist of silent videos, who was displaying pretend emotions (pretend anger and pretend sadness), was displaying a real or a pretend emotion, and to justify their answer. The results show significant differences in the children's capacity to identify and justify pretend emotions according to age and type of emotion. The data suggest that young children recognize pretend sadness, but have more difficulty detecting pretend anger. In addition, children seem to find facial information more useful for the detection of pretend sadness than pretend anger, and they more often interpret the emotional expression of the characters in terms of pretend play. The present research presents new data about the recognition of negative emotional expressions of sadness and anger and the type of information children take into account to justify their interpretation of pretend emotions, which consists not only in emotional expression but also contextual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and born to hearing parents have delays in their social-cognitive development and in particular in their theory of mind (ToM). These delays are often attributed to the difficulties they encounter in acquiring age-appropriate linguistic and communicative skills. The present study asks whether this developmental delay extends to problems with understanding pretend emotions and if linguistic difficulties are related to this area. A total of 173 children (82 DHH and 91 hearing) between 3 and 8 years of age received a set of emotion and language measures. Results showed that children who are DHH were delayed in understanding pretend emotions, and this was strongly related to their difficulties with expressive vocabulary and pragmatics. In summary, children who are DHH and have experienced reduced access to language and communicative interaction have a restricted understanding of the communicative intentions of emotional expressions. These delays may have implications for their social relationships with surrounding family and other children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language, Society & Communication / Llengua, Societat i Comunicació is the property of Llengua, Societat i Comunicacio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up‐ bad is down and good is right‐ bad is left). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants’ hands while responding to the task—regardless of the location of their dominant hand—facilitates the judgment of positive and negative‐valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor–congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies show a link between social cognition, a set of cognitive and emotional abilities applied to social situations, and executive functions in typical developing children. Children with Down syndrome (DS) show deficits both in social cognition and in some subcomponents of executive functions. However this link has barely been studied in this population. The aim of this study is to investigate the links between social cognition and executive functions among children with DS. We administered a battery of social cognition and executive function tasks (six theory of mind tasks, a test of emotion comprehension, and three executive function tasks) to a group of 30 participants with DS between 4 and 12 years of age. The same tasks were administered to a chronological-age control group and to a control group with the same linguistic development level. Results showed that apart from deficits in social cognition and executive function abilities, children with DS displayed a slight improvement with increasing chronological age and language development in those abilities. Correlational analysis suggested that working memory was the only component that remained constant in the relation patterns of the three groups of participants, being the relation patterns similar among participants with DS and the language development control group. A multiple linear regression showed that working memory explained above 50% of the variability of social cognition in DS participants and in language development control group, whereas in the chronological-age control group this component only explained 31% of the variability. These findings, and specifically the link between working memory and social cognition, are discussed on the basis of their theoretical and practical implications for children with DS. We discuss the possibility to use a working memory training to improve social cognition in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important milestones in the development of theory of mind is the understanding of false beliefs. This study compares children's understanding of representational change and others' false beliefs and evaluates the effectiveness of an appearance-reality training for improving children's false belief understanding. A total of 78 children ranging in age from 41 to 47 months were trained in three sessions and evaluated in a pretest and in a posttest. The results show that for children it is easier to understand representational change than false beliefs in others, and that the improvement after training was greater when starting from a higher score in the pretest. The implications of this for training in false belief understanding are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Educational Psychology is the property of International Journal of Educational Psychology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper studies children's capacity to understand that the emotions displayed in pretend play contexts do not necessarily correspond to internal emotions, and that pretend emotions may create false beliefs in an observer. A new approach is taken by asking children about pretend emotions in terms of pretence-reality instead of appearance-reality. A total of 37 four-year-olds and 33 six-year-olds were asked to participate in tasks where they had to pretend an emotion or where they were told stories in which the protagonists pretended an emotion. In each task children were asked: a) if the pretend emotion was real or just pretended and b) if an observer would think that the emotional expression was real or just pretended. Results showed that four-year-olds are capable of understanding that pretend emotions are not necessarily real. Overall, six-year-olds performed better than younger children. Furthermore, both age groups showed difficulty in understanding that pretend emotions might unintentionally mislead an observer. Results are discussed in relation to previous research on children's ability to understand pretend play and the emotional appearance-reality distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the present study focuses on exploring two proposals about the acquisition of the grammatical category of verb. On the one hand, the study aims at analyzing whether the acquisition of a given mass of verbal lexical items occurs before the emergence of productive verbal morphology. On the other hand, the study also explores the possibility that the acquisition of negative structures emerges before productive verbal morphology as well. The study presents longitudinal data based on the linguistic production of a monolingual Spanish-speaking girl at the age of 19 to 27 months. These data show that the amount of verbal vocabulary is a good indicator of productivity as far as verbal morphology is concerned, but such vocabulary development occurs simultaneous to morphological development. The data also show that the learning and productive use of negation occurs before productivity in verbal morphology. These results are discussed in connection to the approach that claims that distributional analysis is a good mechanism for the acquisition of grammatical categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is aimed at comparing children's understanding of the distinction between external and internal emotion in deception and pretend play situations. A total of 337 children from 4 to 12 years of age participated in the study. Previous research suggests that in deception situations this understanding is very rudimentary at the age of 4 years, whereas 6-year-olds can articulate it in words. In the present work the children were asked to make this distinction in pretend play or deception tasks. The results show that in pretend play situations children start making this distinction at the age of 6 years, and their performance is better when the simulated emotion is negative rather than positive. These findings suggest that 4-year-olds are not aware that the emotions expressed in pretend play situations might be different from internal emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine language processing and development in Catalan or Spanish-speaking children with SLI, focusing on the study of the verb. We analyse the key initial phase of its process of acquisition and aim to define common features of the SLI group that distinguish them from children with normal language development. We intend to identify more precisely the kind of delay shown by these children in a language with a rich verb morphology, in terms of both structure and chronology. The sample comprised 18 Catalan-Spanish bilingual pre-school children, assigned to three groups of six; an SLI group and two control groups, one matched for age and the other matched for MLU-w. Developmental data were obtained by recording situations of spontaneous speech at two different time points. Certain differences were found between groups in verb production. Production of verb inflection by children with SLI was only partial at the first evaluation; they maintained the same percentage of errors after a year. The patterns of correct and incorrect verb forms found in Catalan and Spanish do not corroborate the EOI hypothesis, but they support the Surface Hypothesis, given that the number of errors is not particularly high. This suggests the presence of limitations in subjects' processing ability, linked to the typological characteristics of the specific language being learnt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Understanding of Pretend Emotions in Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing" that was published in an online issue of the journal is presented.

The article Are You Really Happy? Children's Understanding of Real vs. Pretend Emotions, written by Francesc Sidera, Anna Amadó and Elisabet Serrat, was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 29 December 2012 without open access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]