This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the…

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not…

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with…

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other…

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously…

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be…

Evidence of semantically based orderings of phrasal coordinations in child speech is explored. Speech samples from two children are analyzed to show that such sequences occur frequently, are internally consistent, and are part of children's active repertoire of referential and expressive acts at an early age. The samples were obtained from one…

An examination of children's sentence structure in Korean argues for a verb phrase (VP) constituent in child grammar, but suggests that this does not necessarily support its existence in adult Korean grammar. Korean children, it is noted, generally restrict their sentences to one word order, subject-object-verb, despite the existence of another…

Examined the development of Irish word order patterns. It was found that the 1.5- to 3-year-olds (N=3) studied used subject-initial utterances more frequently than adults in input, and that for both adults and children the elision of the verb "to be" had a significant role in the placement of subjects in the utterances. (42 references)…