This book gives an overview of the linguistic development of Korean-English bilingual children living in the US. It provides a detailed longitudinal account of English and Korean acquisition in early childhood, offering a close examination of Korean-American children's code-switching and morphology and syntax development during a time when their…

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction…

English- and Japanese-speaking children aged four and five were asked to say the opposite of statements. Statements varied in truth value and unmarked/marked membership of antonym pairs. Findings did not support a universality hypothesis; differences were found between the two groups in the use of semantic and syntactic denial. (Author/CB)

Reports outcomes of three experiments in which children were taught a sentence form that they did not as yet understand. Investigates whether (1) acquisition of word order relations for sentence form would be affected by pragmatic ordering principles and (2) whether referent animacy would be included in children's rules for word order. (Author/BE)

This study compared the morphosyntax of French speaking children with specific language impairment to the morphosyntax of English speaking children acquiring a second language (French). Findings indicated that use of morphosyntax by both groups has significant similarities and children in both groups demonstrated optional infinitive effects in…

This study explored the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense in 21 children with specific language impairment. The findings support a morphosyntactic rather than morphophonological learning model, such as the extended optional infinitive model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children. (Contains…

Reports two studies which found a relationship between awareness of word order in sentences and reading readiness and achievement for children in kindergarten through third grade. Suggests this type of metalinguistic awareness may be important to early reading because it helps children to detect meaningful relationships between words. (Author/CB)

Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)

Comparison of dysphasic children (N=8) with control children found that the dysphasic children's language development was both delayed and deviant, and that the children's deviant syntax structures were the result of insufficient language processing and could not be traced back to structural characteristics of the sentences used by their mothers.…

This study examined the association of chronological age (CA) with syntax and vocabulary comprehension in 102 children and adolescents with mental retardation. Results indicated that intelligence scores accounted for 55% and 29% of the variability of syntax and vocabulary scores, respectively. Introduction of CA into the regression equation…

This study examined changes in the complex syntax production of 85 African American preschoolers and the role of child (gender, age, African American English) and family (home environment) factors. Age, gender, and home environment effects were found for the amount of complex language used. African American English was not related to amount of…

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (a parent-report measure of vocabulary and syntax) was administered to 103 children (mean age 103 months) who participated in a study of temporal resolution as infants. Children who had performed above the median on the temporal resolution task demonstrated better later language development than…

This study used a performance-based model to investigate the impact of discourse demands on the pattern of morphosyntactic deficits exhibited by 10 children with specific language impairments (SLI). Findings suggest distinct deficit profiles for subgroups of children with SLI differing in receptive language abilities, not evident when syntactic…

The language transcripts of seven children with Down syndrome (DS) and seven typically developing children with comparable mean length of utterance levels were compared for verb argument structure. Findings suggest that syntactic difficulties may delay children with DS in overcoming the optional subject phenomena and the lesser number of anomalous…