In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9-2;10 and 2;3-3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

The purpose of this study was to examine early fast mapping abilities in late talkers (LT) and typically developing (TD) Spanish-speaking children by considering the effect of different variables on fast mapping (age, vocabulary level, grammatical category and number morphology). Thirty-eight Spanish-speaking children were assessed at three times…

This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese-English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller's hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between…

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This…

Because dual language learners are the fastest--growing segment of the U.S. student population--and the majority speak Spanish as a first language--the new generation of SLPs must have comprehensive knowledge of how to work effectively with bilingual speakers. That's what they'll get in the second edition of this book, an ideal graduate-level text…