We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-"ba" alternation. The first two…

Research on children's computation of meanings involving the focus operator "only" has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether children's semantic representation of "only" is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing children's knowledge about "only" in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in…

Previous research has suggested that very young children learning English adhere quite rigidly to a grammatical constraint on the possible contexts for contraction of "want" and "to" into the reduced form "wanna". Two elicited production studies reported here suggest that young children do produce "wanna" in illicit contexts. One study identifies…

Data from child language comprehension show that children make errors in interpreting pronouns as late as age 6;6 yet correctly comprehend reflexives from the age of 3;0. On the other hand, data from child language production show that children correctly produce both pronouns and reflexives from the age of 2 or 3. Current explanations of this…

In this study, we investigate children's and adults' relative clause attachment preferences in sentences such as "The student photographed the fan of the actress who was looking happy." Twenty-nine 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children and 37 adult native speakers of English participated both in an auditory questionnaire study and in an…