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Showing 1 to 15 of 64 results Save | Export
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Uli Sauerland; Marie-Christine Meyer; Kazuko Yatsushiro – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…
Descriptors: Toddlers, German, Child Language, Form Classes (Languages)
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Helen Engemann – Journal of Child Language, 2024
Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…
Descriptors: French, Language Acquisition, Monolingualism, English
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Angelopoulos, Nikos; Bagioka, Dafni-Vaia; Terzi, Arhonto – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others' authority or mental perspective, where "others" stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Morphology (Languages), Age Differences
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Kawar, Khaloob; Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor; Armon-Lotem, Sharon – First Language, 2023
The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their…
Descriptors: Story Telling, Preschool Children, Arabic, Language Variation
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Asli Aktan-Erciyes; Ebru Ger; Tilbe Göksun – First Language, 2024
This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children's L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish…
Descriptors: Monolingualism, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction
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Messenger, Katherine; Hardy, Sophie M.; Coumel, Marion – First Language, 2020
The authors argue that Ambridge's radical exemplar account of language cannot clearly explain all syntactic priming evidence, such as inverse preference effects ("greater" priming for less frequent structures), and the contrast between short-lived lexical boost and long-lived abstract priming. Moreover, without recourse to a level of…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Syntax, Priming, Criticism
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Nozomi Tanaka; Elaine Lau; Alan L. F. Lee – First Language, 2024
Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Native Language, Language Classification, Preferences
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Nguyen, An D.; Legendre, Geraldine – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Language Acquisition, Questioning Techniques, Preschool Children
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Forbes, Samuel H.; Plunkett, Kim – Child Development, 2020
When and how do infants learn color words? It is generally supposed that color words are learned late and with a great deal of difficulty. By examining infant language surveys in British English and 11 other languages, this study shows that color word learning occurs earlier than has been previously suggested and that the order of acquisition of…
Descriptors: Cultural Differences, Vocabulary Development, Color, Infants
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Joanine Hester Nel; Frenette Southwood; Michelle Jennifer White – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…
Descriptors: African Languages, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Language Classification
Danyang Wang – ProQuest LLC, 2022
This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Phrase Structure, Language Research, Child Language
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Yacovone, Anthony; Rigby, Ian; Omaki, Akira – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2020
Children's sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous "wh"-questions like "Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?", they preferentially associate the "wh"-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g.,…
Descriptors: French, Phrase Structure, Language Acquisition, Verbs
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Paquette-Smith, Melissa; Cooper, Angela; Johnson, Elizabeth K. – Journal of Child Language, 2021
Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…
Descriptors: Infants, Language Processing, Pronunciation, Mandarin Chinese
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Gracanin-Yuksek, Martina; Lago, Sol; Safak, Duygu Fatma; Demir, Orhan; Kirkici, Bilal – Second Language Research, 2020
Previous work has shown that heritage grammars are often simplified compared to their monolingual counterparts, especially in domains in which the societally-dominant language makes fewer distinctions than the heritage language. We investigated whether linguistic simplification extended to the anaphoric system of Turkish heritage speakers living…
Descriptors: Grammar, Turkish, Native Language, Second Language Learning
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Schouwstra, Marieke; Swart, Henriëtte; Thompson, Bill – Cognitive Science, 2019
Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent-ordering patterns to indicate "who did what to whom," yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language…
Descriptors: Nonverbal Communication, Language Acquisition, Bayesian Statistics, Preferences
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