This study examines the quantity and quality of child-directed speech across household activities in a socioeconomically diverse sample of Argentinian Spanish-speaking children, an understudied population. Thirty children (mean: 14.3 months) and their families were audio-recorded for four hours. The middle two hours were transcribed and analysed…

Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children's…

The purpose of this work is to determine how widely and in which semantic and morphologic categories, word associations are used by children. There is no study about word associations children use in the acquisition of Turkish as their mother tongue. Participants of the current research consisted of a total of 90 kids between 4.0 and 6.0 years of…

The Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., "tui dao" "push fall" and "pa shang" "climb ascend") encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

Many sentences of adult English are analytic constructions, namely clauses with a matrix verb complemented by a dependent predicate that does not have an expressed syntactic subject. Examples are subject and object control, raising to subject or object, periphrastic tense, aspect and modality, copular predication and "do"-support. In…

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

The data on language acquisition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) primarily come from studies in English reporting particular morphemes that differentiate them from their typically developing (TYP) peers, but markers of impairment vary cross-linguistically. There is some cross-linguistic evidence that SLI disrupts language…

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense,…

The focus of this paper is the acquisition of the verb "eat." The transcripts of 40 children who were audiotaped monthly from 1;0 to 3;0, showed that "eat" was the first member of this verb class to be acquired. (16 references) (JL)

The relationship between prototype meanings and frequency of use is investigated with a view to establishing a foundation for the problem of "prototype acquisition." One polysemous basic verb, "put," is used in this study of native speaker discourse, and implications for both prototype theory and the acquisition of polysemy are…

Argues that a unified account for the observed phenomena in first- and second-language acquisition and in native speaker use of tense-aspect morphology (TMA) is found in the discourse function of TMA. Three cognitive principles (Relevance, Congruence, One to One) plus access to a notion of prototypicality can account for language learners'…

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…

Reports a study of two- and three-year-olds' acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that took a second verb in their complements. Complement types, complementizer connectives, and the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific to individual matrix verbs. (Author/CB)