The study investigates whether Italian verbal inflectional morphology is associated with inhibitory control skills after controlling for receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory. A sample of Italian preschoolers aged 4;0 to 6;0 was assessed using a standardized inhibitory control task tapping two different inhibitory skills (response…

This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4)…

Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children…

Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee…

Irish is a rapidly changing minority language spoken as the main community language in some areas of the officially Irish-speaking "Gaeltacht" regions in Ireland. We analyse narratives from 17 parent-child dyads, living in one such area. All children, aged 3-6;4, had high exposure to the local variety of Irish. The input quality was…

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

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…

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that typically developing children have difficulties comprehending non-canonical structures. These findings have been interpreted within the Relativized Minimality (RM) approach, according to which local relations cannot be established between two terms of a dependency if an intervening element possesses similar…

Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age…

The objective of this work was to analyze morphosyntactic development in a wide sample of children with Down syndrome (DS) ("n" = 92) and children with typical development (TD) ("n" = 92) with a mental age (MA) of 20 to 29 months. Children were individually matched for gender and MA (Analysis 1) and for vocabulary size…

The present study compared the performance of twenty-seven French-speaking internationally adopted (IA) children from China to that of twenty-seven monolingual non-adopted French-speaking children (CTL) matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status on a Clitic Elicitation task. The IA children omitted significantly more accusative object…

This longitudinal study involving 101 Dutch four- and five-year-olds charts indirect request (IR) and mental state term (MST) understanding and investigates the role that Theory of Mind (ToM) and general linguistic ability (vocabulary, syntax, and spatial language) play in this development. The results showed basic understanding of IR and MST in…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…