When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

In an investigation of discourse sensitivity, Catalan-speaking children aged 4 to 8 years were asked two different questions in a picture description task. One was a wide-focus question ("What is happening?"); the other was a narrow-focus question ("What is happening to 'the patient'?"). Children of all age groups displayed sensitivity to the…

The distribution of a small number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings are reported on the proportion of grammatically analyzable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses.…