Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds' verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in…

Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple…

This study was designed to examine the strength of question types to obligate complete responses from children, and the effect of age and play context. Participants were typically developing children (mean ages 2;8, 3;4 and 4;7), who engaged in play with three speech-language pathologists in play contexts. Questions posed to the children were…

Background: Despite studies of how parent-child interactions relate to early child language development, few have examined the continued contribution of parenting to more complex language skills through the preschool years. The current study explored how positive and negative parenting behaviours relate to growth in complex syntax learning from…

Famously, "dog bites man" is trivia whereas "man bites dog" is news. This illustrates not just a fact about the world but about language: to know who did what to whom, we must correctly identify the mapping between semantic role and syntactic position. These mappings are typically predictable, and previous work demonstrates…

Inspired by Syrett (2013), three experiments explored children's ability to distinguish "attributives" (e.g., "three-pound strawberries," where MPs as adjectives signal reference to attributes) versus "pseudopartitives" (e.g., "three pounds of strawberries," where MPs combine with "of" to signal…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

This study investigates the coordination of matrix and subordinate clauses within finite complement-clause constructions. The data come from diary and audio recordings which include the utterances produced by an American English-speaking child, L, between the ages 1;08 and 3;05. We extracted all the finite complement-clause constructions that L…

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and "wh"-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and…

Background and aims: High quality student-teacher relationships (STR) are important for children's academic and social development. We explore how individual child language domains (semantics, syntax, pragmatics), teacher years of experience, and classroom placement (general or special education) relate to STR quality for children with autism…

This study examines whether lexical repetition, syntactic skills, and working memory (WM) affect children's syntactic-priming behavior, i.e. their tendency to adopt previously encountered syntactic structures. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children were primed with prenominal (e.g. "the yellow…

Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice…

When "again" modifies an English goal-PP construction, the sentence is ambiguous between a repetitive and a restitutive reading. Interestingly, languages vary in whether their counterpart to English "again" permits a restitutive reading with goal-PP constructions (Beck 2005; Beck & Snyder 2001). This article explores how…

This study investigates the developmental trajectory of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin-learning children's speech. We analyze the spontaneous production of RCs by four monolingual Mandarin-learning children (0;11 to 3;5) and their input from a longitudinal naturalistic speech corpus (Min, 1994). The results reveal that in terms of the…