Collocations are understood to be integral building blocks of language processing, alongside individual words, but thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

This article investigates the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five- and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the…

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…

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not…

Children acquiring language infer the correct form of syntactic constructions for which they appear to have little or no direct evidence, avoiding simple but incorrect generalizations that would be consistent with the data they receive. These generalizations must be guided by some inductive bias--some abstract knowledge--that leads them to prefer…

In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children's grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…

We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with…

Although the effect of acoustic cues on speech segmentation has been extensively investigated, the role of higher order information (e.g., syntax) has received less attention. Here, the authors examined whether syntactic expectations based on subject-verb agreement have an effect on segmentation and whether they do so despite conflicting acoustic…

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other…

One central question in the formal linguistic study of adult multilingual morphosyntax (i.e., L3/Ln acquisition) involves determining the role(s) the L1 and/or the L2 play(s) at the L3 initial state (e.g., Bardel & Falk, Second Language Research 23: 459-484, 2007; Falk & Bardel, Second Language Research: forthcoming; Flynn et al., The…

Research has shown that the comprehension of definite referring expressions (e.g., "the triangle") tends to be faster for "given" (previously mentioned) referents, compared with new referents. This has been attributed to the presence of given information in the consciousness of discourse participants (e.g., Chafe, 1994) suggesting that given is…

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or…