Verb-marking errors are a characteristic feature of the speech of typically-developing (TD) children and are particularly prevalent in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, both the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and the pattern of verb-marking deficit in DLD vary across languages and interact…

Multisyllabic words constitute a large portion of children's vocabulary. However, the relationship between phonological neighborhood density and English multisyllabic word learning is poorly understood. We examine this link in three, four and six year old children using a corpus-based approach. While we were able to replicate the well-accepted…

This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora -- one of child speech and one of adult speech -- specifically exploring whether words…

When engaged in conversation, both parents and children tend to re-use words that their partner has just said. This study explored whether proportions of maternal and/or child utterances that overlapped in content with what their partner had just said contributed to growth in mean length of utterance (MLU), developmental sentence score, and…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early language acquisition. CDI data have been used to explore a variety of theoretically important topics, but, with few exceptions, researchers have had to rely on data collected in…

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

This study examined the development of and possible predictors of interrogative forms and functions in early childhood Mandarin. All the interrogatives drawn from the Early Child Mandarin Corpus (168 children 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) were analyzed. The main results indicated that (i) there were significant age effects in interrogative forms and…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

Several models of language acquisition have emerged in recent years that rely on computational algorithms for simulation and evaluation. Computational models are formal and precise, and can thus provide mathematically well-motivated insights into the process of language acquisition. Such models are amenable to robust computational evaluation,…

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…

Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11-4 ;…

Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at…

The impact of input frequency (IF) and functional load (FL) of segments in the ambient language on the acquisition order of word-initial consonants is investigated. Several definitions of IF/FL are compared and implemented. The impact of IF/FL and their components are computed using a longitudinal corpus of interactions between thirty…

Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that…