Issues around child templates
This chapter adds longitudinal analyses of children learning two languages not yet included here, Lebanese Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese. It then looks at two more children learning British English, a diary and an observational study, each of which permits closer examination of the emergence and facing of templates. The chapter then reviews a study of expressive late talkers, providing a procedure for quantifying template use and illustrating it with analyses of three British late talkers with good comprehension skills. The study was too small to draw firm conclusions, but it did show that for late talkers, unlike typically developing children, templates may prove more of a hindrance than a help in phonological and lexical advance. In concluding the chapter considers the function of child templates, noting ways in which they may be supporting of word learning for children whose strongest phonetic limitations fall within the first two years.