Purpose: This study examined working memory in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The overarching goal of this work was to integrate three primary processing-based hypotheses of DLD, (a) limited verbal working memory, (b) slowed processing speed, and (c) inefficient inhibition of interference, by using the…

It has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer "A and B" from sentences of the form "A or B." Although children's conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported…

The research presented here uses theoretical constructs of formal syntax to account for performance data in agreement production. The phenomenon examined is object interference in French, i.e., incorrect agreement of the verb with the object. In the first experiment, interference is shown to occur in object relative clauses despite the absence of…

This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish-English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual…

A study examined repair sequences in talk between two German-English bilingual children and between parent and child within a nuclear family in which German is generally spoken. Data were drawn from tape recordings and developmental diaries kept on the two preschool children. Patterns of parent-child and child-child corrections were examined. In…

Investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual (Spanish-English) acquisition context. Also explored whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual…

An overview of bilingualism and language acquisition is followed by a description of a research study of the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and English in three children. (RM)

The spontaneous speech of a six-year-old bilingual child was analyzed for this study. The child has lived in the United States and English is her primary language but her parents speak only French in the home and she has spent several months in France during three visits there. The data used in this study were collected in the child's home by her…

This paper focuses on lexical mixing and language switching in a French-English bilingual Canadian child. (CHK)

Spanish-speaking children of Northern New Mexico exhibit varying degrees of interference and integration of English in their speech. (CK)

This study attempts to determine whether the syntactic errors children make while learning a second language are due to native language interference or to developmental cognitive strategies, as has been found in first language acquisition. (Author)

The subject of this article is a Cantonese-speaking infant who arrived in the U.S. at 16 months. At 19 months, three striking anomalies marked her Cantonese speech. These anomalies are discussed; it is proposed that their origin may have been her new English-speaking environment. (CHK)

Discusses several objections to Krashen's Input Hypothesis which states that language acquisition is the learners' understanding of a language at a stage slightly higher than their current one because of their understanding of extralinguistic cues of the language. (Author/LMO)

Studies the acquisition of the morphological rules for plural, agentive, and demonstrative suffixes in Dutch. Native-speaking and second language learning children were studied. Both groups showed acquisition orders for plural and agentive, and the second-language group showed interference in acquiring the agentive. Morphological acquisition thus…