Editorial: New trends in typical and atypical language acquisition

Abstract

[eng] This Research Topic presents a selection of contributions linked to the IX AEAL International Congress on Language Acquisition. The Association for the Study of Language Acquisition (AEAL; https://aeal.eu) promotes research on language acquisition and development in both, monolingual and multilingual contexts, with a particular focus on Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician, as well as the relationships between language and psychological, social, educational and biological processes. The triennial AEAL Congress has reached its 10th edition since 1995, and it has become one of the most relevant international scientific events in the field of language acquisition, bringing together experts in diverse areas, including grammar, lexicon, discourse analysis, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language teaching and education. A substantial body of research on language acquisition from these broad and interdisciplinary perspectives has been published in previous AEAL conference volumes (Pérez-Pereira, 1996; Mayor et al., 2005; Diez-Itza, 2008; Aguilar-Mediavilla et al., 2019). The 18 articles included in this Research Topic provide an updated contribution to this research area, fostering and giving continuity to the dissemination and open discussion of new trends in the study of typical and atypical acquisition, as promoted by AEAL. They address the key topics covered in the AEAL Congress on Language Acquisition, including studies on phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical-semantic levels, the development of discourse and pragmatics, literacy acquisition and development, language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual contexts, assessment and intervention in developmental language disorders, language learning and teaching, and new methodological approaches. Accordingly, this Research Topic offers an integrated view of theoretical, methodological and applied issues from multilingual and multidisciplinary perspectives. It includes review articles, brief research reports and original research articles employing experimental, cross-sectional and longitudinal designs that cover a wide range of crucial issues in the field. The studies examine language acquisition among native speakers of various languages and dialects (i.e., Chilean, Colombian, Mexican and Peninsular Spanish; Basque; Catalan; Italian; English); in both monolingual and bilingual participants, across different age groups (infants, children, adolescents, and adults), and in both typical and atypical development (e.g., Developmental Language Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder; Williams and Down Syndromes, Hearing Impairment). A variety of research methods and assessment tools for spontaneous and elicited oral and written language are employed, including those from the CHILDES Project (MacWhinney, 2000), PROESC (Cuetos-Vega et al., 2002), PREP-CORP (Diez-Itza et al., 2022), PDP-PI (Junquera and Zubiauz, this volume), MacArthur Bates CDI (Fenson et al., 2007), SSRT Repetition Task (Bravo et al., this volume), The Pragmatics profile (Dewart and Summers, 1995), and MUAQ (Aparici et al., this volume). Additionally, instruments such as eyetracking, the preferential-looking paradigm, multimodal input in foreign language teaching or technology-assisted intervention in neurodevelopmental disorders can also be found.