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Yi-Ching Su – Language Learning and Development, 2024
It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Language Processing, Adults, Language Patterns
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Forsythe, Hannah; Greeson, Daniel; Schmitt, Cristina – Language Learning and Development, 2022
In many so-called canonical null subject languages, null and overt subject pronouns have contrasting referential preferences: null subjects tend to maintain reference to the preceding subject while overt pronominal subjects do not. We propose that children acquire this contrast by initially restricting their attention to 1st and 2nd person…
Descriptors: Spanish, Form Classes (Languages), Language Variation, Foreign Countries
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Shetreet, Einat; Novogrodsky, Rama – Language Learning and Development, 2020
Universal quantifiers, which refer to groups of individuals or events, can express a subtle distinction between collective (unified or simultaneous) and distributive (individuated and separate) events. Indeed, English uses different quantifiers for this distinction ("all" and "each", respectively). Hebrew, however, has a single…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Form Classes (Languages), Semitic Languages, Syntax
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Yang, Meiling; Wang, Yunqi – Language Learning and Development, 2023
How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…
Descriptors: Correlation, Numeracy, Linguistic Theory, Syntax
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Zhao, Shuyan; Ren, Jie; Frank, Michael C.; Zhou, Peng – Language Learning and Development, 2021
The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children's ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Case Studies, Pragmatics, Language Skills
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Wang, Shuyan – Language Learning and Development, 2023
Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Mandarin Chinese, English, Short Term Memory
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Callen, M. Cole; Miller, Karen – Language Learning and Development, 2022
Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Language Acquisition, Parent Child Relationship, Syntax
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He, Angela Xiaoxue; Kon, Maxwell; Arunachalam, Sudha – Language Learning and Development, 2020
Linguistic contexts provide useful information about verb meanings by narrowing the space of candidate concepts. Intuitively, the more information, the better. For example, "the tall girl is 'fezzing,'" as compared to "the girl is fezzing," provides more information about which event, out of multiple candidate events, is being…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, Learning Processes, Language Processing
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Garraffa, Maria; Coco, Moreno I.; Branigan, Holly P. – Language Learning and Development, 2015
We investigated the production of subject relative clauses (SRc) in Italian pre-school children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and age-matched typically-developing children (TD) controls. In a structural priming paradigm, children described pictures after hearing the experimenter produce a bare noun or an SRc description, as part of a…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Language Impairments, Syntax, Priming
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Miller, Karen – Language Learning and Development, 2012
In this paper we investigate the effect of variable input on the acquisition of grammar. More specifically, we examine the acquisition of the third person singular marker -s on the auxiliary "do" in comprehension and production in two groups of children who are exposed to similar varieties of English but that differ with respect to adult…
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Grammar, Linguistic Input, Language Acquisition