Auditory processing and spoken word recognition difficulties have been observed in Specific Language Impairment (SLI), raising the possibility that auditory perceptual deficits disrupt word recognition and, in turn, phonological processing and oral language. In this study, fifty-seven kindergarten children with SLI and fifty-three language-typical…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

This study focuses on morphophonology and frequency in past tense production. It was assessed whether Dutch five- and seven-year-old typically developing (TD) children and eight-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce the correct allomorph in regular, irregular, and novel past tense formation. Type frequency of the…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

One-year-olds (N=11) showed no differences in comprehension of words containing consonants that they had never successfully produced (attempted), words with consonants easily produced (in), and words with consonants never before produced or attempted (out). Attempted and out words were less likely to be acquired in production than in words.…

Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the…

Distinctive feature specification and representation in phonological acquisition are examined in 30 children in the context of underspecification theory. Three questions were addressed: which features do children use to categorize segmental information; do the defining features of a category shift as the phonological system advances; and which…

The influence of information level on the production of accuracy of 20 children was examined. Data were children's productions of nouns in sets of utterances referring to triplets of pictures representing noun-verb-noun utterances. (Author/JL)

To examine the persistence of phonological selectional constraints on young children's lexical choices, the words attempted in the conversational speech of a longitudinal sample of 12 normally developing preschoolers from age 2;0 to 5;0 were scored for syllabic length, presence of consonant clusters, and distribution of constituent phonemes. (29…

Analysis of five Mohawk children's strategies for acquiring morphology revealed that the earliest segmentation of words was phonological, rather than morphological. Morphological structure was apparently discovered when most utterances were long enough to include pronominal prefixes as well as roots. (Author/CB)

The claim that multiple-birth children use "twin language" was investigated by describing and comparing the phonological characteristics of the speech of 19 sets of multiple birth children (aged 2-4) and by measuring multiple-birth children's understanding of their twins' or triplets' context-free speech. Results indicated that multiple…

The lexical variables of word frequency and neighborhood density were hypothesized to facilitate sound change to varying degrees. Twelve children with functional phonological delays participated in an alternating-treatments experiment to promote sound change. Results indicated word frequency was most facilitative in sound change, whereas dense…

This paper investigates the acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress ("hot dog" vs. "hot dog") in English. This has previously been shown to be acquired quite late, in contrast to recent research showing that infants both perceive and prefer rhythmic patterns in their own language. Subjects (40 children in four groups the averages ages of which…

Evaluates the principle of laryngeal-supralaryngeal cyclicity by manipulating the domain cycle and phase relationship of the cycle as independent variables and by monitoring longitudinally the order of emergent phonemic distinctions in the sound systems of seven children with phonological delays as the dependent variable. Findings are discussed.…

This study examined adult and child word-initial voice onset time productions in English and Hindi to determine the age of acquisition of the phonemic voice contrast. Cross-linguistic differences in patterns of acquisition were found, but these were not necessarily traced to the different phonological systems. (JL)