The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

We report on an eye-tracking study that investigated four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). Children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to RC structures identifying a unique referent (e.g. "Can you pick up the horse that pushed the pig?"). Two RC types,…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

This study analyzes the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of children's relative clauses in spontaneous speech. Longitudinal data from five Japanese children are analyzed and compared with English data (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000). The results show that the relative clauses produced…

One central question in the formal linguistic study of adult multilingual morphosyntax (i.e., L3/Ln acquisition) involves determining the role(s) the L1 and/or the L2 play(s) at the L3 initial state (e.g., Bardel & Falk, Second Language Research 23: 459-484, 2007; Falk & Bardel, Second Language Research: forthcoming; Flynn et al., The…