This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking…

Interface Delay is a theory of syntactic development, which attempts to explain an array of constructions that are slow to develop, which are characterized by being sensitive to discourse-pragmatic considerations of the type associated with the natural semantic class of definites. The theory claims that neither syntax itself, nor the…

Several studies investigated preschoolers' ability to compute scalar and ad-hoc implicatures, but only one compared children's performance with both kinds of implicature with the same task, a picture selection task. In Experiment 1 (N = 58, age: 4;2-6;0), we first show that the truth value judgment task, traditionally employed to investigate…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding…

The aims of the study were to establish whether there is a correlation between the socioeconomic background of Afrikaans-speaking children and their performance on a dialect-neutral language test, and to ascertain whether the allowance the test currently makes for parental education level is sufficient. The Afrikaans version of the…

This longitudinal study examined the predictive validity of the MacArthur Communicative Developmental Inventories-Short Form (CDI-SF), a parent report questionnaire about children's language development (Fenson, Pethick, Renda, Cox, Dale & Reznick, 2000). Data were first gathered from parents on the CDI-SF vocabulary scores for seventy-six…

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment…

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)

Reviews the properties and consequences of the Principle of Contrast. It is argued that this principle accounts for the acquisition of irregular forms in morphology and that it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of allomorphy. (62 references) (GLR)

A set of predictions based on Reinhart's (1986) Theory of Relevance are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge. Pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge. (Contains 22…

Examines children's errors in interpreting 'ask' as 'tell' in the framework of pragmatic development. Results indicate that if the children do not know the information, they relay the question, i.e., 'ask.' If they do know the answer, they supply it, i.e., 'tell.' (EKN)

Gives a syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure analysis of mothers' speech to children of 1;0, 1;8, 2;3, and 5;0 years, showing that the age of the child to whom mothers were speaking could be predicted very accurately from her speech. The changes in mothers' speech are responses to concurrent changes in children's language…

Reports on an investigation of the surface forms used by mothers to direct their children's behavior, and of the ways in which these forms are modified as the children grow older and their comprehension of indirect speech acts increases. (AM)

Measures of pragmatic development for children in the second year of life were developed based on a 30-minute language sample drawn from 20 children. Results support the view that the range of pragmatic functions grows steadily during the one-word and early two-word stage and that it is measurable. (Author/AM)