Learning the meanings of words 

Young language learners often come across many possible meanings for a new word. This is referred to as referential ambiguity. Dr Sam Jones & Prof Gert Westermann outlined recent research findings that can tell us more about how children solve the problem of referential ambiguity, and how this can be applied to clinical practice. Find out how word learning can be effectively facilitated and what simple strategies are available to support vocabulary growth. This article is now available to read in the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists' Bulletin magazine.

How to build a Language Acquisition Device

How children manage to acquire language (the most sophisticated communication system in the known universe) in just a few short years is one of the questions that has fascinated Professor Caroline Rowland for more than two decades. Professor Rowland recently gave one of the Abralin online lectures with a discussion led by Dr Samantha Durrant. This lecture informs us about the most recent findings on language development, illustrating the insights they have given into how the brain develops and why languages differ. You can access the recording here. 

Language Development in Sub-Saharan Africa 

The study of language development in diverse settings is possibly one of the most crucial ways for us to understand how children in general develop language. Dr Katie Alcock recently gave a keynote at the South African Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Society virtual conference about language development research in the wide variety of settings she has worked in within sub-Saharan Africa. In this talk she describes the development of the Communicative Development Inventory (a widely used set of measures of communication development in young children) for Kenyan and Southern African languages, and its use in applied studies. Her talk entitled Language development in sub-Saharan Africa can now be viewed here.

Hollis Scarborough's Reading Rope 

This year is the 20th anniversary of Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, a framework for the development of the word recognition and language comprehension skills that support reading comprehension. Prof Kate Cain has contributed to two seminar series on this topic. The first was a podcast on the language structures strand for Amplify Reading where she explores language structures in the simple view of reading and explains its connections across reading comprehension in literacy development. She also highlights the reciprocal relationship between books and conversation and underscores the importance of reading aloud to children from a young age to develop their vocabulary and semantics. The second is a pre-recorded talk on verbal reasoning for PaTTAN. Recordings and Resources Related to PaTTAN's 20th Celebration of Scarborough's Reading Rope including Kate's talk can be found here.