Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

It has long been known that children may use a particular grammatical morpheme inconsistently at early stages of acquisition. Although this has often been thought to be evidence of incomplete syntactic representations, there is now a large body of crosslinguistic evidence showing that much of this early within-speaker variability is due to still…

The purpose of this study was to determine if children acquire grammatical case as a unified system or in a piecemeal fashion. In English language acquisition, many children make developmental errors in marking case on subject position pronouns (e.g., "Me" do it, "Him" like it). It is unknown whether children who produce…

Noun-related morphosyntax has not been emphasized in the literature on children with specific language impairment (SLI), yet, across languages, problems in this area are quite apparent. This review is designed to highlight noun-related difficulties that seem to be especially troublesome for these children. A review of the research literature on…

This cross-sectional study investigated the use of four verbal indices of social knowledge (personal pronouns, verb conjugations, people words and mental state language) and their concurrent relations in a sample of 287 Italian-speaking children between 18 and 36 months. Results showed that the production of all indices increased with age. Mental…

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by (N = 243) children aged 2-5 and their caregivers were…

This study used elicited production methodology to investigate the negative sentences that are produced by English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Negative sentences were elicited in contexts in which adults use the negative auxiliary verb doesn't (e.g., "It doesn't fit"). This form was targeted to see how…

In her valuable commentary, Kerkhoff raises several issues, both empirical and conceptual. In particular, she argues that morphophonological regularities represented in associative memory might suffice for the acquisition of French grammatical gender. She thus questions whether a default implemented as a rule is necessary and whether it is even…

This article questions how two very similar sets of experiments can yield such very different findings, and comments on the differences between the studies. Here Annamarie Kerkhoff presents a commentary on some perceived differences between the studies in areas such as age groups and group sizes evaluated. Kerkhoff also comments on some…

The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4-2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across the…