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Non-Verbal Predicate Negation in Child Emirati Arabic
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Dimitrios Ntelitheos; Marta Szreder – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…
Descriptors: Arabic, Language Variation, Foreign Countries, Morphemes
Acquisition of Russian Noun Case by Bilingual Children: Lexical Cues to Case Assignment in Real and Novel Words
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Anna Chrabaszcz; Nina Ladinskaya; Anastasiya Lopukhina – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n =…
Descriptors: Russian, Bilingualism, Pictorial Stimuli, Monolingualism
"Smashing" Verb Learning through Parental Sound Symbolic Input in Preterm and Full-Term Children
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Seref Can Esmer; Erim Kizildere; Tilbe Göksun – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children's verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could…
Descriptors: Verbs, Parent Child Relationship, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input
Gradual Syntactic Triggering: The Gradient Parameter Hypothesis
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Howitt, Katherine; Dey, Soumik; Sakas, William Gregory – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner's confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner's linguistic input. Crucially,…
Descriptors: Linguistic Theory, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics, Guidelines
Acquisition of English Adjectival Resultatives: Support for the Compounding Parameter
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Wang, Shuyan; Kido, Yasuhito; Snyder, William – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations ("particles") and adjectival resultatives ("ARs"). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter ("TCP"). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Form Classes (Languages), English, Verbs
When Morphology Is Not Enough: The Acquisition of Voice in Monolingual Greek Children and Bilingual Children with Greek as a Heritage Language
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Anastasia Paspali; Theodoros Marinis; Artemis Alexiadou – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
The acquisition of voice in Greek remains understudied, especially in heritage populations. Voice in Greek poses a challenging acquisition task for children due to its syncretism, marking various verb classes as well as passives. The present study explores the acquisition of anticausatives, reflexives, and passives in 6-to-8-year-old monolingual…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Task Analysis, Pictorial Stimuli, Preferences
Toddlers Track Hierarchical Structure Dependence
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Shi, Rushen; Legrand, Camille; Brandenberger, Anna – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2020
Previous research suggests that toddlers can rely on distributional cues in the input to track adjacent and nonadjacent grammatical dependencies. It remains unclear whether toddlers understand the hierarchical phrase structures that determine the corresponding grammatical dependencies. We addressed this question by testing toddlers on two…
Descriptors: Toddlers, Cues, Linguistic Input, Grammar
Revisiting the Epistemic Gap: It's Not the Thought That Counts
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Cournane, Ailís – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, Inferences, Syntax
Acquiring "wanna": Beyond Universal Grammar
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Getz, Heidi R. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Language Universals, Grammar, Language Usage
Child Heritage Speakers' Acquisition of the Spanish Subjunctive in Volitional and Adverbial Clauses
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Dracos, Melisa; Requena, Pablo E. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests…
Descriptors: Spanish, Verbs, Form Classes (Languages), Monolingualism
A Large-Scale Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Acquisition of Passive
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Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Haman, Ewa; de López, Kristine Jensen; Smoczynska, Magdalena; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Szczerbinski, Marcin; van Hout, Angeliek; Dabašinskiene, Ineta; Gavarró, Anna; Hobbs, Erin; Kamandulyte-Merfeldiene, Laura; Katsos, Napoleon; Kunnari, Sari; Nitsiou, Chrisa; Olsen, Lone Sundahl; Parramon, Xavier; Sauerland, Uli; Torn-Leesik, Reeli; van der Lely, Heather – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
This cross-linguistic study evaluates children's understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and…
Descriptors: Language Research, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Language Acquisition
The Acquisition of Logical Connectives in Child Mandarin
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Su, Yi – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2014
This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Phrase Structure, Mandarin Chinese, Toddlers
Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Spanish Heritage Speakers
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Montrul, Silvina; Sanchez-Walker, Noelia – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2013
We report the results of two studies that investigate the factors contributing to non-native-like ability in child and adult heritage speakers by focusing on oral production of Differential Object Marking (DOM), the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects in Spanish. In study 1, 39 school-age bilingual children (ages 6-17) from the…
Descriptors: Immigrants, Native Speakers, English (Second Language), Foreign Countries
Article Omission across Child Languages
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Guasti, Maria Teresa; Gavarro, Anna; de Lange, Joke; Caprin, Claudia – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2008
Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are…
Descriptors: Semantics, Nouns, Syntax, Form Classes (Languages)