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Pearl, Lisa; Sprouse, Jon – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
We investigate concrete acquisition theories for a derived approach to linking theory development and explore to what extent two prominent linking theories in the syntactic literature--UTAH and rUTAH--can be derived from the data that English-learning children encounter. We leverage a conceptual acquisition framework that specifies key aspects of…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Linguistic Input
Aravind, Athulya; Koring, Loes – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Syntax
Huang, Nick; White, Aaron Steven; Liao, Chia-Hsuan; Hacquard, Valentine; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
Attitude verbs like "think" and "want" describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Linguistic Theory, Verbs, Psycholinguistics
Naila Tallas-Mahajna; Esther Dromi – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Morphemes, Language Acquisition, Arabic
Ringstad, Tina; Kush, Dave – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…
Descriptors: Verbs, Linguistic Input, Norwegian, Phrase Structure
Silvia Perez-Cortes – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…
Descriptors: Spanish, Phonemes, Native Language, Second Language Learning
Joanine Hester Nel; Frenette Southwood; Michelle Jennifer White – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…
Descriptors: African Languages, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Language Classification
Laurence B. Leonard; Mariel L. Schroeder – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…
Descriptors: English, Language Acquisition, Developmental Delays, Morphology (Languages)
Yacovone, Anthony; Rigby, Ian; Omaki, Akira – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2020
Children's sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous "wh"-questions like "Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?", they preferentially associate the "wh"-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g.,…
Descriptors: French, Phrase Structure, Language Acquisition, Verbs
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
Santos, Ana Lúcia; Gonçalves, Anabela; Hyams, Nina – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support…
Descriptors: Portuguese, Verbs, Language Acquisition, Young Children
Tagliani, Marta; Vender, Maria; Melloni, Chiara – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…
Descriptors: Italian, Language Acquisition, Knowledge Level, Phrase Structure
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
Schaeffer, Jeannette – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
This study addresses the question as to what cognitive abilities influence performance on article choice and direct object scrambling in high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Schaeffer (2016/2018) shows that a group of 27 high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with ASD, aged 5-14, overgenerates the…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Indo European Languages, Autism, Pervasive Developmental Disorders
Dracos, Melisa; Requena, Pablo; Miller, Karen – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in…
Descriptors: Spanish, Language Acquisition, Verbs, Semantics