In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in…

Through analysis of the language, this study aimed to investigate the current practice of using songs in public library storytimes. Language interactions in 68 storytime programs involving 652 child participants were observed and transcribed. Then, textual analysis was conducted to examine the language of singing songs, focusing on how language…

This paper reports on a young Korean boy's target-like and non-target-like uses of the Korean negation marker "ani" to express various types of negation in Korean, observed approximately between the ages of 2;2 and 2;5. Besides the target-like usage of "ani" as a sentential adverb for a 'no' response, he used "ani" in…

This paper reports on a young Korean boy's target-like and non-target-like uses of the Korean negation marker "ani" to express various types of negation in Korean, observed approximately between the ages of 2;2 and 2;5. Besides the target-like usage of "ani" as a sentential adverb for a 'no' response, he used "ani" in…

To acquire language, learners have to map the language onto the environment, but languages vary as to how much information they include to constrain how a sentence relates to the world. We investigated the conditions under which information within the language and the environment is combined for learning. In a cross-situational artificial language…

This case study describes the use of a syntax intervention with two deaf children who did not acquire a complete first language (L1) from birth. It looks specifically at their ability to produce subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure in American Sign Language (ASL) after receiving intervention. This was an exploratory case study in which…

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

The hypothesis that impoverished language experience affects complex sentence structure development around the end of early childhood was tested using a fully randomized, sentence-to-picture matching study in American Sign Language (ASL). The participants were ASL signers who had impoverished or typical access to language in early childhood. Deaf…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

The interrogative sentence expression of 22 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFA) was tested using an induced experimental paradigm and compared with two groups of typical developing children matched by chronological age and language age. Results from the present study demonstrated that the interrogative sentence expression…

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were…

Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive "-s," whereas the…

We discuss the causative-inchoative alternation in Turkish Sign Language (Türk Isaret Dili -- TID), and the age of acquisition effects on multi-predicate, complex constructions that are observed in both causative and inchoative events. We present a picture-description task performed by 24 adult signers, half of which were exposed to TID from birth…

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…