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Virginia Valian – Language Learning and Development, 2024
The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Language Acquisition, Language Variation, Grammar
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Lustigman, Lyle; Berman, Ruth A. – Language Learning and Development, 2021
The study examines phases in developing specification of grammatical marking of emergent clause-combining (CC) as indicative of children's growing ability to integrate two or more independent predications. To this end, both intra- and inter-clausal analyses were applied to all CC utterances produced by three Hebrew-acquiring children aged 2;0-3;0,…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Grammar, Semitic Languages, Language Acquisition
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Lorimor, Heidi; Stephens-Hecker, Nola; Miller, Carol – Language Learning and Development, 2019
Using an oral sentence production task, we investigated how preschoolers (N = 28) produce agreement with complex noun phrases and compared their performance to college students (N = 32) to determine whether preschoolers produce agreement patterns that are qualitatively similar to adults'. We also conducted corpus analyses to investigate relevant…
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Nouns, Phrase Structure, College Students
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Koulaguina, Elena; Legendre, Géraldine; Barrière, Isabelle; Nazzi, Thierry – Language Learning and Development, 2019
We examined French-learning toddlers' sensitivity to Subject-Verb agreement with conjoined subjects. In French, a conjoined NP triggers plural agreement even when made up of individual singular NPs. Processing of this infrequent structure in the input (see Corpus Analyses) requires going beyond surface patterns of non-adjacent dependencies to…
Descriptors: Syntax, Verbs, Toddlers, Language Acquisition
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Leischner, Franziska N.; Weissenborn, Jürgen; Naigles, Letitia R. – Language Learning and Development, 2016
The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…
Descriptors: German, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Nouns
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Arosio, Fabrizio; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Forgiarini, Matteo; Guasti, Maria Teresa – Language Learning and Development, 2012
We investigated the processing of agreement marking and case marking in the comprehension of German relative clauses in 48 seven-year-old monolingual German-speaking children in a picture selection task. We examined the relation between the effectiveness of these different morphological cues and individual memory resources as measured by a…
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Language Acquisition, Monolingualism, Cues