How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are…

To determine the normal sequence of the development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish speakers, ages 2-5, a study of the acquisition of interrogative formation was undertaken. Two male and two females from each of nine age intervals between two and five were selected as informants; all were…

A study of the acquisition of interrogative forms in children of high socioeconomic status reveals that utterances belong more to the colloquial than to the standard range. It is concluded that disadvantaged children would show similar usage, leading to the suggestion that teachers teach language as they use it. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Cross-linguistic investigation of the importance of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in French and Spanish four through six-year-olds' sentence comprehension revealed that topological cues helped French subjects most, while local cues helped Spanish subjects most. (Author/CB)

This article describes a series of experiments concerning the relationship between cognitive processes and learning a second language. Similarities and differences between first language acquisition and second language learning by children and adults are discussed. (CFM)

This study examined the effects of children's cognitively based role expectations on their judgments of the grammatical acceptability of sentences. Sixty children, 12 each in grades 4 through 8, individually heard 10 sentences violating the Minimum Distance Principle (MDP). The sentences were grammatical, but linguistically complex, and violated…

The normal sequence of development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish-speaking children, two to five years old, was studied to determine the syntactic structures and range of language variability at each chronological age level. Middle-class children, living in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of…