Presents the Lexical/Semantic Hypothesis, which proposes that early learning is more lexically oriented, and that early word combinations can be explained by more semantically oriented accounts than the Full Competence Hypothesis. The article also replaces the Grammatical Infinitive Hypothesis with the Modal Hypothesis. (32 references) (Author/CK)

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)

Estimating readability requires more than a formula comparing word length and sentence length. Other factors to be considered include vocabulary, the relationship between syntax and readability, the syntax used in children's oral language, and writing style. Steps are outlined for systematically estimating readability of instructional materials…

The development of the expression of grammatical categories in German in Turkish and German children attending a bilingual day care center in a multilingual speech community in Berlin is examined. Results indicate no evidence that pragmatic categories precede syntactic ones, but some evidence shows that grammatical markers develop first as…

Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

Reports a case study of a British 2-year old that shows a stage in syntactic development without a subject agreement protection but with a tense phrase. A sharp contrast in use of verb forms suggests that the child had left the Optional Infinitive stage and entered a transitional stage, where the major development is that the status of the bare…

Explores the acquisition process of relative clauses in Japanese and Korean. Examines the issue of whether Korean "kes" and Japanese "no" found in Korean and Japanese relative clauses are each a complementizer or a head noun.(Author/VWL)

Explores two Mandarin-speaking children's ability to refer to the past in mother-child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. Results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the cross-linguistic patterns of the overgeneralization of the intransitive/transitive alternations found in children's speech and provides new evidence from findings based on the acquisition of French. The morphosyntatic characterization of such phenomena in English and Hebrew child language is followed by a description of the…

Various commentaries are included in response to an article on filler syllables and their status in emerging grammar. (Author/VWL)

Demonstrates that an understanding of children's language-acquisition difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions should be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. Maintains this can be done only in the context of a view of syntactic representation…

This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be…

An alternative to the standard theory that language learners always formulate the simplest rule to accommodate data is proposed. This new position states that the system of formulating rules and the generalizations made from it by children and adults in the stages of language learning needs to be more specific. The present theory excludes the use…

A study of Korean children's interpretation of the reflexive pronoun "caki" when it precedes a third person noun phrase, that is, in backward anaphora, had as subjects 4- to 11-year-old children living in Korea. Test sentences designed on the basis of two important syntactic aspects in Korean reflexive anaphora--relational hierarchy and…

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy.…