This dissertation presents behavioral studies that target the early syntactic representations of "wh"-movement during infancy and early childhood. Previous studies show that by 20 months-old, infants represent "wh"-movement and use this knowledge to respond to "wh"-questions during language comprehension tasks…

This study analyses variation sets in a sample of child-directed speech (CDS) in Turkish in terms of their structure and effect on child speech. The term "variation set" was first introduced to describe the sequences of repetitions, in which the intention behind expressions stays the same throughout the whole conversation while the form…

Vulnerability of morphosyntactic production, including grammatical aspect, has been identified in at least some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to typologically different languages. However, Tovar et al. (2015) found strengths in comprehending grammatical aspect in English-exposed children with ASD, suggesting that the…

A new solution is offered to the Infant Language Acquisition Problem, rejecting both of Chomsky's alternatives. It proposes that the infant does not acquire his mother tongue by mastering its grammar, whether by inference from personal experience or via an innate Language Acquisition Device such as the UG, but that the language he hears is all…

Research Findings: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of linguistic training based on the use of the Drežancic method in educational settings. It is hypothesized that characteristics of this method, based on the typical stages of linguistic and cognitive development, could influence both language competence and executive function (EF). A…

Talkers hyperarticulate vowels when communicating with listeners that require increased speech intelligibility. Vowel hyperarticulation is said to be motivated by knowledge of the listener's linguistic needs because it typically occurs in speech to infants, foreigners and hearing-impaired listeners, but not to non-verbal pets. However, the degree…

Three studies are presented in this paper that address how nonsigners perceive the visual prosodic cues in a sign language. In Study 1, adult American nonsigners and users of American Sign Language (ASL) were compared on their sensitivity to the visual cues in ASL Intonational Phrases. In Study 2, hearing, nonsigning American infants were tested…

This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle "auch" "also" by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle "auch" by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented "auch" compared to the accented one. But in…