Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns ("The sheep is/are fat"), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas…

We investigated whether children's inhibitory control (IC) is associated with their ability to produce irregular past tense verb forms as well as learn from corrective feedback following overregularization errors. Forty-eight 3;6 to 4;5 year old children were tested on the irregular past tense and provided with adult corrective input via models of…

Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task,…

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for…

Learning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese-English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of -"ed" as an…

The current study examined the production of Hebrew verbal passives across adolescence as mediated by linguistic register and verb morphology. Participants aged eight to sixteen years and a group of adults were asked to change written active-voice sentences into corresponding passive-voice forms, divided by verb register (neutral and high),…

Children acquiring French elaborate their early verb constructions by adding adjacent morphemes incrementally at the left edge of core verbs. This hypothesis was tested with 2657 verb uses from four children between 1;3 and 2;7. Consistent with the Adjacency Hypothesis, children added clitic subjects frst only to present tense forms (as in…

The present study investigated children's early use of verb inflection in Japanese by comparing a generativist account, which predicts that the past tense will have a special default-like status for the child during the early stages, with a constructivist input-driven account, which assumes that children's acquisition and use of inflectional forms…

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…

This study examined accuracy in production and grammaticality judgements of verb morphology by eighteen Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language (L2) followed longitudinally from four to six years of exposure to English, and who began to learn English at age 4;2. Children's growth in accuracy with verb morphology reached a…

This study focuses on morphophonology and frequency in past tense production. It was assessed whether Dutch five- and seven-year-old typically developing (TD) children and eight-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce the correct allomorph in regular, irregular, and novel past tense formation. Type frequency of the…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child…

This study explores the development of children's knowledge of linguistic and pragmatic aspects of singular and plural in Italian, for definite articles (Experiment 1) and verbs (Experiment 2). Participants aged three to adult were asked to pick objects from two dishes, each with a different number of items on them (one vs. two), following the…

Acquisition of regular inflectional suffixes is an integral part of grammatical development in English and delayed acquisition of certain inflectional suffixes is a hallmark of language impairment. We investigate the relationship between input frequency and grammatical suffix acquisition, analyzing 217 transcripts of mother-child (ages 1 ; 11-6 ;…