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…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system,…

The purpose of this study was to determine if children acquire grammatical case as a unified system or in a piecemeal fashion. In English language acquisition, many children make developmental errors in marking case on subject position pronouns (e.g., "Me" do it, "Him" like it). It is unknown whether children who produce…

Although the Japanese reflexive "zibun" can be bound both locally and across clause boundaries, the third-person pronoun "kare" cannot take a local antecedent. These are properties that children need to learn about their language, but we show that the direct evidence of the binding possibilities of "zibun" is sparse…

Mandarin classifiers are a complex system, but little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children manage to learn the system. Based on the extant literature, we explored potential factors influencing the comprehension and production of Mandarin shape classifiers, including classifier-based semantic categorization and errors pertaining to the…

This study investigates the coordination of matrix and subordinate clauses within finite complement-clause constructions. The data come from diary and audio recordings which include the utterances produced by an American English-speaking child, L, between the ages 1;08 and 3;05. We extracted all the finite complement-clause constructions that L…

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by…

Some children's speech impairment resolves spontaneously. Others have persistent problems affecting academic and social development. Identifying early markers that reliably predict long-term outcome would allow better prioritization for preschool intervention. This article evaluates the significance of different types of speech errors, made by 93…

We compare the predictions of two different accounts of first language acquisition by investigating the relative contributions of abstract syntax and input frequency to the elicited production of main and embedded questions by 36 monolingual English-speaking toddlers aged 3;00 to 5;11. In particular, we investigate whether children's accuracy…

This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech ("Elephant said that he gets the football"), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm…

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese,…