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…

Segmental variation in maternal speech to children changes over time. This study investigated variation in non-citation speech processes in a longitudinal, 26-hour corpus of maternal northern Australian English. Recordings were naturalistic parent-child interactions when children (N = 4) were 1;6, 2;0, and 2;6. The mothers' speech was phonetically…

Background: Little empirical research examines the process in which home literacy environment (HLE) in toddlerhood is associated with preschoolers' vocabulary and decoding skills using a large-scale dataset. Objective: The purposes of the current study were to (a) examine the differential effect of HLE in toddlerhood on preschoolers' vocabulary…

This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese-English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller's hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between…

This study focuses on a trilingual toddler's ability to differentiate her Tagalog, Spanish and English productions on phonological/phonetic grounds. Working within the articulatory phonology framework, the word-initial segments produced by the child in Tagalog, Spanish and English words at age 1;10 were narrowly transcribed by two researchers and…

English-speaking children make pronoun case errors producing utterances where accusative pronouns are used in nominative contexts ("me do it"). We investigate whether complex utterances in the input ("Let me do it") might explain the origin of these errors. Longitudinal naturalistic data from seventeen English-speaking two- to four-year-olds was…

The transition from slow to rapid word-learning was examined in a longitudinal study of 18 children. Results revealed that most children evidenced a prolonged period during which rate of acquisition increased, with most of the acquired words being nouns, while those who demonstrated gradual word-learning acquired a balance of nouns and other word…

Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced.…

Investigates the acquisition of elements that instantiate the grammatical category of "inflection"--copula "be," auxiliary "be" and 3sg present agreement--in longitudinal transcripts from five children, aged from 1 year and 6 months to 3 years and 5 months in the corpora examined. Aimed to determine whether inflection emerges as a unitary…

Studies using the English and Spanish MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories demonstrated that the grammatical abilities of 20--30-month-old bilingual children were related more strongly to same-language vocabulary development than to broader lexical-conceptual development or maturation. First, proportions of different word types in each…

A longitudinal study examined two-year-olds' acquisition of the English auxiliary system after a six-week exposure to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Results indicated that subjects did not significantly differ from a baseline group that did not receive additional input. (Author/CB)

This study investigated developmental patterns of acquisition of the unrounded U.S. English vowels, by following 6 normally developing children from 22 to 30 months of age. Three classes of production errors were identified: intertrial production variability, context-sensitive substitutions, and context-free systematic substitution patterns.…

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

Investigates acquisition of the rhyme using cross-sectional and longitudinal data from 14 English-speaking children between 1- and 2-years of age. Focuses on four questions pertaining to rhyme development that are motivated from current theories of prosodic acquisition. (Author/VWL)

A longitudinal study investigated how a hearing child of deaf parents simultaneously acquired American Sign Language and spoken English. Neither of two unique properties of signed language (personal pronouns or "negative" sign markers) facilitated acquisition of English, suggesting that children's acquisition of grammar is relatively…