Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies…

Purpose: This study used structural equation modeling to investigate the dimensionality of language in Spanish-English bilingual kindergartners. Five theoretical models were compared, including (a) a unidimensional model; (b) a two-dimensional model by language (Spanish, English); (c) a three-dimensional model by domain of language (phonology,…

Purpose: The current study examines bilingual children's development of Spanish and English morphosyntax structures over the period of 1 year. Identification of morphosyntax forms clustered by difficulty can elucidate their development and guide clinicians to select appropriate targets for intervention and monitoring. Specifically, we aim to…

Bilinguals employ both global and local control mechanisms to manage coactivated languages that compete for selection, yet little is known about how they operate on morphosyntactic information. The current study investigated bilingual language control mechanisms for a morphosyntactic production task. Across two experiments, 48 early…

Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows…

The current study examined early grammatical marking in a relatively understudied language, Mandarin, by using the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Two waves of data collection included 338 monolingual children (17-36 months; 143 female) at Time 1 and 308 children (32-55 months; 139 female) at Time 2 and…

Languages tend to have three major clause types (declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives), dedicated to three main speech acts (assertions, questions, commands). However, the particular forms that these clause types take differ from language to language, and have to be learned. Previous experimental results suggest that by 18 months old,…

Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit…

Each language has its unique way to mark grammatical information such as gender, number and tense. For example, English marks number and tense/aspect information with morphological suffixes (e.g., -"s" or -"ed"). These morphological suffixes are crucial for language acquisition as they are the basic building blocks of syntax,…

The Portuguese present perfect (P-PP) is an understudied topic in the field of generative language acquisition. In the past decade, Third Language Acquisition (L3A) has enjoyed special attention in studying how multilingualism works. Researchers have concentrated on the examination of the source of transfer at the initial stages. However, there is…

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…

Purpose: Understanding what is known about the language profiles of children with hearing loss (CHL) is vital so that researchers and teachers can identify the specific complex syntactic structures that CHL may struggle to master. An understanding of which aspects of complex syntax pose difficulties for CHL is necessary to inform the kind of…

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Research on monolingual children has shown that listening comprehension is predicted by a range of language and cognitive skills; less is known about predictors of listening comprehension in bilingual children and about the role of language input. This study presents longitudinal data on predictors of English listening comprehension in 100…