This study compares the use of the variable (q), which is realized as rural [q] and urban [?], in the speech of twenty-two parents and their twenty-one children from the village of Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. The study shows that children acquire the general gendered linguistic pattern of the community but do not replicate the linguistic frequencies…

Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we…

English-speaking children exhibit difficulty in their comprehension of raising patterns, such as (1), in which the NP the boy is semantically linked to the VP in the embedded clause, but is syntactically realized as the subject of the matrix clause. (1) Raising pattern: [s "The boy" seems to the girl [s _ to be happy]]. This dissertation…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

In this squib we examine the time course of children's acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kayne's (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional…

Considers children's understanding and use of contrast in language, including discussion of the role contrast plays in adult speech, the kinds of contrast commonly exemplified, and possible tests for sameness or difference of meaning. (CB)

Narratives from part-Hawaiian children 5 to 12 years old in a variety of circumstances were collected for several years. Typical verbal routines, ways of analyzing the data, tendency of routines to structure speech events, functions of nonnarrative routines in narrative performance, and establishing a context for narration are considered. (EJS)

Refutes the reanalysis of a phonologically disordered child's use of fricatives as developed by Fey (1989) within a relational framework. Evidence in the form of nonsystematic correspondence between the child's substitution patterns and the target sound system is used to further establish accuracy of the original independent generative analysis…

Re-analysis of data regarding children's acquisition of tense and aspect indicated that children learning Polish were influenced by aspect in acquiring verb tense in the same way as children were influenced in learning other languages. Children beginning to learn verb inflections found aspectual contour particularly compelling in leading them to…

This paper discusses the role of attention to uncertainty in mediating the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. It is proposed that language from the very beginning is used to resolve uncertainty by selectively marking points of change, deviation from the familiar or choice from among alternatives. Several research findings are…

As may be seen from data collected during language observations of four children over a period of two and a half years, children's sentences are not simply flawed versions of adult counterparts, but seem to result from a different grammar. These data indicate that logical formatives, such as "even," and "only," are sentence-initial constituents.…

Luo-speaking children in Kenya responded to a test using nonce forms in morphophonology. Morphophonological processes in the acquisition of Luo plurals and possessives presented different degrees of difficulty for the subjects, with the type of morphophonological alteration in a language likely to affect the rate and order of acquisition.…

Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES ( MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word-class n-gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade-offs in leading or following this…

Tests the prediction that children acquiring left-branching languages will exhibit a preference for backward patterns of anaphora by presenting data from Japanese and Korean which show the prediction to be false. Findings support the view that any directionality preference for anaphora is the same for all languages. (Author/SED)

Presents longitudinal data from simultaneously bilingual German-English children with respect to development of negation and syntactically related modal particles. Data provide evidence for both language separation and cross-linguistic influence. Relative order of verbs and sequential modifiers appears not to be a principled syntactic operation,…