Investigates the case of a 7-year-old boy with severe word-finding difficulties. The study used a series of theoretically motivated questions as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation to determine the cause of his difficulties. Findings indicated pervasive deficits in phonological processing, deficits interpreted as a developmental…

Presents data from 4 Inuit children ages 2;0 to 3;6 that shows relatively early acquisition of both simple and complex forms of the passive. Within this age range, children are productively producing truncated, full, action, and experiential passive. Reasons for this precociousness, including adult input and language structure, are explored. (56…

Notes that in a typical word monitoring paradigm, subjects monitor ongoing language input for a pre-designated target word and that independent variables include the nature and position of the target word and the context in which it is embedded. Also notes that forms of this task are suitable for studies with young children and with individuals…

Tests Pine & Lieven's (1993) suggestion that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. Results reveal that the positional analysis accounts for 60% of the children's multiword utterances and that most other utterances are defined as frozen. (33…

Examined the strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning for simultaneous bilingual infants with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Findings revealed that the correlation was strong, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20% between observations.…

Compares the acquisition of the English to- and for-dative alternation by native-speaking English, Japanese, and Korean children. Investigates whether second language learners (L2) like native language learners overextend the double-object variant and whether L2 learners, like L2 adults, transfer properties of the native language grammar.…

Studied the relationship between parents' correcting of childrens' sentences and children's subsequent grammaticality. Found that parent's language corrections are related to children's subsequent grammaticality but that recasts of incorrect sentences serve as negative leading indicators of grammaticality. Also shows that correction and negative…

Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

The years after children demonstrate comprehension of particular syntactic structures have received little attention. What happens in language development after mastery is achieved? Are children then like adult speakers in judging the acceptability of grammatical structures? Questions addressed in this research were: Will older children and young…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the linguistic differences in the spontaneous speech of language-deviant children in two very different situations. Spontaneous speech samples of eleven five-year-old language-deviant children were obtained from: (1) the traditional adult-child therapy situation using appropriate stimulus materials; and…

In speaking a child sometimes makes constructions in which a sequence of separate utterances expresses a semantic relation not expressed by either utterance. These "vertical constructions" are the main point of this study. Previous studies of construction in child language have largely dealt with sentences. In this study, sentences are…

The speech of a 2-year-old monolingual Estonian child was studied over a period of six months. The child's initial and medial consonants and clusters were examined and charted to highlight her difficulties. Stops and nasals were easier than fricatives and sonorants; by 1 year 7 months the labials were essentially mastered; fricatives were more…

This paper studies aspects of the conceptual basis for language acquisition, with a focus on the perceptual-cognitive skills used to assign meanings to words. A first assumption is that the correspondence between adult and child perceptual features allows for early communication. Apparently, in the first year, naming is characterized by…

Previous studies dealing with the age at which children acquire constituent order preferences have been in conflict. This study was designed to determine if children with normal language development demonstrate constituent order preferences as early as age three and one-half, or a mean age of four years, one month. To test this competency, an…