Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…

What are the sources of variation in the input, and how much do they matter for language acquisition? This study examines frequency variation in manner-of-articulation classes in child and adult input. The null hypothesis is that segmental frequency distributions of language varieties are unigram (modelable by stationary, ergodic processes), and…

The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98…

Before they are three years old, most children have started to build coherent discourse. This article focuses on one important linguistic device children have to learn: connectives. The main questions are: Do connectives emerge in a fixed order? And if so, how can this order be explained? In line with Bloom "et al." (1980) we propose to explain…

The acquisition of reference involves both morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study investigates whether Dutch, English and French two- to three-year-old children differentiate in their use of determiners between non-specific/specific reference, newness/givenness in discourse and mutual/no mutual knowledge between interlocutors. A brief analysis of…

Examination of the relationship between linguistic forms and the functions they serve in one- to two-year-olds' (N=6) early talk about agentivity and control found that the subjects systematically employed different self reference forms to mark distinct perspectives on agency. 34 references. (Author/CB)

Presents a study of the spontaneous pre-sentential negations of preschool English-speaking children that supports the hypothesis that child English nonanaphoric pre-sentential negation is a form of metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. A detailed discourse analysis reveals these child negations as echoic and expressive of objection and…

The present research investigated whether children's referential choices for verb arguments are motivated by pragmatic features of discourse referents across different developmental stages, not only for children learning null argument languages but also for those learning overt argument languages. In Study 1, the form (null, pronominal, or…

Examined miscommunication episodes occurring between 2.5-year-olds and their parents during videotaped free play sessions. Although children generally responded appropriately in form to parental clarification requests, they responded more often to and resolved successfully more of those following their own requests than those following their…

Cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in infant babbling analyzed 1047 vowels produced by 10-month-olds (N=20) from French, English, Cantonese, and Arabic language backgrounds. Results revealed differences among infants across language backgrounds, with the differences paralleling those found in adult speech in the…

Investigation of use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language found that sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Most omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of "mixed"…

Analysis of negative utterances from English-, French-, and Korean-speaking one- through three-year-olds identified nine distinct semantic/pragmatic categories with a similar developmental order in all three languages. Different patterns were found in the form-function relationship for the different categories. (Author/CB)