When talking to infants, adults, especially mothers, espouse a particular type of speech known as Infant-directed Speech (IDS) or "babytalk" or "babytalking" , which contains a set of specialized speech with simplified grammatical construction; more repetitive; and more grammatical than adult-directed speech. Specifically, this…

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

Some research in child language suggests that semantically general verbs appear in grammatical structures earlier than semantically complex, specific ones. The present study examines whether this was the case in nouns, using imageability as a proxy measure of semantic generality. Longitudinal corpus data from 12 children from the Manchester corpus…

This paper documents the occurrence of form variability through diminutive "wordplay", and examines whether this variability facilitates or hinders morphology acquisition in a richly inflected language. First, in a longitudinal speech corpus of eight Russian mothers conversing with their children (1.6-3.6), and with an adult, the use of diminutive…

This study explores the acquisition of complex words composed of both verbs and nouns through novel forms produced spontaneously by a French-English bilingual child. Diary recordings were kept by the child's mother from ages 2:8 to 5:0. The results showed little support for a proposed developmental sequence based on cross-sectional data e.g.,…

This study investigated the use of generic noun phrases by preschool children and their mothers. Results indicate striking differences in the way generics and non-generics are distributed in the speech of both groups, suggesting generic noun phrases differ in their semantics and conceptual organization from non-generics and may reflect children's…