TY - JOUR A1 - Horn, Peter A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Ehlert, Antje A1 - Adani, Flavia T1 - Tapping into the interplay of lexical and number knowledge using fast mapping BT - a longitudinal eye-tracking study with two-year-olds JF - Infant behavior & development : an international and interdisciplinary journal N2 - Language skills and mathematical competencies are argued to influence each other during development. While a relation between the development of vocabulary size and mathematical skills is already documented in the literature, this study further examines how children's ability to map a novel word to an unknown object as well as their ability to retain this word from memory may be related to their knowledge of number words. Twenty-five children were tested longitudinally (at 30 and at 36 months of age) using an eye-tracking-based fast mapping task, the Give-a Number task, and standardized measures of vocabulary. The results reveal that children's ability to create and retain a mental representation of a novel word was related to number knowledge at 30 months, but not at 36 months while vocabulary size correlated with number knowledge only at 36 months. These results show that even specific mapping processes are initially related to the acquisition of number words and they speak for a parallelism between the development of lexical and number-concept knowledge despite their semantic and syntactic differences. KW - Number KW - Number knowledge KW - Cognitive development KW - Fast mapping KW - Word KW - learning KW - Cross-domain development Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101573 SN - 0163-6383 SN - 1879-0453 VL - 64 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stegenwallner-Schütz, Maja A1 - Adani, Flavia T1 - Number dissimilarity effects in object-initial sentence comprehension by German-speaking children with specific language impairment JF - Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR / American Speech Language Hearing Association N2 - Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of the structural intervention account for German, number agreement should assist the correct interpretation of object-initial sentences. Method: This study examines German-speaking children with SLI and a control group of age-matched typically developing children on their sentence comprehension skills for auditory presented subject-verb-object and object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences. The sentences were manipulated with respect to the number properties of the noun phrases (e.g., one plural and one singular, or both singular) and the number agreement of the verb. Results: The group of children with SLI demonstrated poorer comprehension accuracy in comparison to controls. Comprehension difficulty was limited to OVS sentences among children with SLI. In addition, children with SLI comprehended OVS sentences in which number agreement (with plural subject and verb inflection) indicated the noncanonical word order more accurately than OVS sentences with two singular noun phrases and therein did not differ from controls. Conclusion: The study suggests that number agreement helps alleviate the difficulty with OVS sentences and enhances comprehension accuracy, despite the finding that children with SLI exhibit lower comprehension accuracy and more heterogeneous interindividual differences, relative to controls. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-19-00305 SN - 1092-4388 SN - 1558-9102 VL - 64 IS - 3 SP - 870 EP - 888 PB - American Speech-Language-Hearing Assoc. CY - Rockville ER -