Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __"want"__, __"see"__, and __"get"__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and…

Children are frequently confronted with so-called "test questions". While genuine questions are requests for missing information, test questions ask for information obviously already known to the questioner. In this study we explored whether two-year-old children respond differentially to one and the same question used as either a genuine question…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

Previous research has reported that bilingual children sometimes produce mixed noun phrases with "correct" gender agreement--as in "der dog" ("der" being a masculine determiner in German and the German word for "dog", "hund", being masculine as well). However, these could obviously be due to chance or to the indiscriminate use of a default…

The two main models of children's acquisition of inflectional morphology--the Dual-Mechanism approach and the usage-based (schema-based) approach--have both been applied mainly to languages with fairly simple morphological systems. Here we report two studies of 2-3-year-old Polish children's ability to generalise across case-inflectional endings…

We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with…

Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel…

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other…

Eight 20- to 26-month-old children were exposed to 4 novel nouns in a game context over several weeks to determine whether, when, and in what ways the children would use them beyond their original linguistic forms. The majority were productive in their use of the nouns, indicating that the grammatical category for noun is operational by age 2.…

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in…

Presents evidence that the supposed paradox in which infants find abstract patterns in speech-like stimuli whereas even some preschoolers struggle to find abstract syntactic patterns within meaningful language is no paradox. Asserts that all research evidence shows that young children's syntactic constructions become abstract in a piecemeal…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…

Investigates whether children ages 1;6 just beginning to learn words can learn new words in a variety of nonostensive contexts. The results of two studies involving adults interacting with children in games of searching for objects suggest that from very early in language acquisition, children learn words through active attempts to understand…