Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

While acquisition of more than one language from birth is a relatively common phenomenon, whether children under two years of age use their languages in a differentiated manner has not yet been established. The current study investigates the pragmatic differentiation of a child who lives in Australia and was acquiring two minority languages,…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

A survey examining the effect of sex, age and social class on the development of the speech habits of children of elementary school age in Germany. (Text is in German.) (TL)

A discussion focusing on the concept of metalinguistic awareness, particularly in bilingual children, precedes a discussion of metalinguistic awareness and its potential relationship with the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. The metalinguistic history and metalinguistic awareness of a subject, bilingual in German and English, are highlighted.…

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0.…

The development of plurals in two German-speaking children was analyzed, based on observational data. It was argued that the children were learning plurals by rote, conditioned by morphological complexity which cannot be subsumed under any general rule. (Author/NCR)

Two nonce-word studies examined German-speaking children's productivity with the "Perfekt" (present perfect) from 2;6 to 3;6. The German "Perfekt" consists of the past participle of the main verb and an inflected form of an auxiliary (either "haben" "have" or "sein" "be"). In Study 1, nonce verbs were either introduced in the infinitival form, and…

Longitudinal data on the language of one German-speaking child were gathered from her 16th to her 26th month. Speech acts involving "where" questions were isolated and analyzed. The following order of referential development was discovered: (1) pragmatic conditions taking the form of certain action-contexts first relieve the discourse…

Found dissociations between regular and irregular inflectional processes in the formation of English past tenses, German noun plurals, and German participles. Children's inflectional errors include using regular patterns for irregular forms. Some linguistic processes, such as forming compound words, are sensitive to the distinction between regular…

A study based on monthly recordings of one bilingual child exposed to English and German suggests that, contrary to earlier research, the acquisition of sociolinguistic rules appears to precede the acquisition of structural rules. The assumption that linguistic sophistication is necessary for children to understand that they are exposed to two…

Addresses two questions: (1) When do children who are bilingual from birth become aware that they speak two languages? and (2) What are the factors that lead to this awareness? The subjects in the study described here were Italian/German bilingual children living in the Italian region of Alto Adige. (CFM)

The purpose of this study was to determine what effect exposure to linguistic input pertinent to kinship terms and kinship relations has on the acquisition of the meaning of such terms. The subjects were 84 German children living in families, and 84 orphans. (Author/CFM)

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…

Presents longitudinal data from simultaneously bilingual German-English children with respect to development of negation and syntactically related modal particles. Data provide evidence for both language separation and cross-linguistic influence. Relative order of verbs and sequential modifiers appears not to be a principled syntactic operation,…