Bilinguals have been shown to differ from monolinguals especially in the realization and interpretation of phenomena that operate at the syntax/discourse interface. Hungarian has a well-known interface structure--identificational focus--which has been widely studied in the theoretical literature but never with bilinguals. The present article fills…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic…

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds'…

An annotated bibliography of materials that are useful in studying developmental pragmatics is presented. Two areas of pragmatics which are not included are referential communication and sociolinguistics. The annotations are brief and are intended to indicate the general content of the entry, but not experimental results or overall quality. Some…

Children's understanding of the grammatical categories of "determiner" and "adjective" was examined using 2 different methodologies. In Experiment 1, children heard novel nouns combined with either a or the. Few 2-year-olds, but nearly all 3- and 4-year-olds, subsequently produced the novel nouns with a different determiner from the modeled…

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

The pragmatic and semantic categories used by Ss varied across age groups. Results are discussed with regard to age, expressive modality, mean length of utterances, and hearing loss. There was much variation among these parameters in communicative development across Ss. (Author/DLS)

A phenomenon called "pragmatic variation" is discussed as a child's individual system of behavior in response to a question the child doesn't understand but realizes that he must verbalize an answer to. (NCR)

Inferences about linguistic competence in children are typically based on spontaneous speech. Children's use of complex object and adverbial noun phrase is seen as a reflection of pragmatic factors. Similar adult patterns indicate children's lack of subject clauses may be due to the nature of spontaneous speech. (CHK)

Examines the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. (Author/VWL)

This article reviews recent investigations of the development of phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics in the development of speech and language by African American children. Clinical implications are offered to aid the distinction between normal language development using features of African American English and language disorders.…

Indicates that (1) children's violations decreased with age; (2) in the dyadic context, fathers assumed a more directive role in response to children's violations than did mothers; (3) there were no between-parent differences between parents regarding reactions to children's violations in the triadic context. (NKA)