Children are thought to learn second languages (L2s) using primarily implicit mechanisms, in contrast to adults, who primarily rely on explicit language learning. This difference is usually attributed to cognitive maturation, but adults also receive more explicit instruction than children, which may influence their learning strategies. This study…

To better understand how toddlers integrate multiple learning strategies to acquire verbs, we compared sensorimotor recruitment and comparison learning because both strategies are thought to boost children's access to scene-level information. For sensorimotor recruitment, we tested having toddlers use dolls as agents and compared this strategy…

We investigated how bilinguals choose words in a narrative task, contrasting the possibilities of a developmental delay vs. compensatory strategies. To characterize a developmental delay, we compared younger (three to five years) and older (seven to ten years) children's lexicalization of target words (Study 1). The younger children told shorter…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic…

Analysis of five Mohawk children's strategies for acquiring morphology revealed that the earliest segmentation of words was phonological, rather than morphological. Morphological structure was apparently discovered when most utterances were long enough to include pronominal prefixes as well as roots. (Author/CB)

Study of children who go through a "silent period" early in the course of second language development found that most of the children engaged in extensive private speech, including: repetition of others' utterances; recall and practice; creation of new linguistic forms; paradigmatic substitution; and rehearsal for overt social…

This study tested the hypothesis that children as young as two years use what adults tell them about meaning relations when making inferences about new words. Subjects (n=18) learned two new terms, with instructions to treat one term as superordinate to the other or replace one with the other, and with no instructions. Children used both kinds of…

Investigation of native English-speaking adults' and native Spanish-speaking children's acquisition of noun gender and its function in Spanish revealed significant differences in first- and second-language acquisition, suggesting a developmental progression in acquisition of noun gender for both groups. (Author/CB)

Garman (1974), reporting on 20 Tamil children aged 3 to 5, postulated a linguistic strategy and 2 prelinguistic strategies to explain results of a question-picture choice task involving sentences with embedded and subordinate clauses. Reanalysis of this data identifies four processing strategies and argues that certain grammatical sensitivities…

On the basis of two experiments on comprehension, it is argued that children go through at least three stages in acquiring the deictic contrasts between "here and there," and between "this and that." Children follow different routes through these states, since they choose different starting points in mastering deitic contrasts.…

Similarity neighborhoods for words in young children's lexicons were investigated using three computerized databases. Results revealed that words in five- and seven-year-olds' lexicons have many fewer similar neighbors. (Author/CB)

Examines the relationship between cross-sectional measures of referential style and measures based on the first 50 words in 12 first-born children. Because no relationship was found, it is argued that age-defined cross-sectional measures confound strategy differences in early language development with variation resulting from differences in…

Investigates the similarities and differences in individual approaches to the linguistic organization of narrative. The study identified strategies used, including thematic subject, nominal and anaphoric. Findings reveal that a variety of strategies was adopted by all age groups and that ability to maintain a strategy across the narrative's…