This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR…

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

The durational characteristics of novel words produced in repeated trials were evaluated in separate groups of children with, and without speech delay (SD). Children produced disyllabic novel words containing either a trochaic or iambic stress pattern. Results of acoustic analysis indicated a significant interaction between trial number and…

It is possible to construct a case for the child's interpretation of "of" in "must of been" as the preposition "of" in the process of language acquisition. Assuming the familiar concept that linguists should construct the simplest analysis compatible with a phenomenon, it is suggested that some children construct a…

Describes a study designed to test if, when children describe actions, they consider the role an entity plays in an action, independent of the animateness of the entity. Results indicate that young children have relational intentions which are independent of animateness. (EKN)

Anaphora, a linguistic structure that refers to previously mentioned or implied text, has been implicated as a possible cause of reading comprehension difficulty among children. Reading research has focused on the surface structures of anaphora (pronouns and noun demonstratives, for example) and has viewed comprehension of anaphora as a language…

Sentences evoked from three- to five-year-olds (N=16), analyzed for errors (particularly copying-without-deletion), showed errors when: the subject noun phrase (NP) contained a relative clause, the relative clause had an object gap, and the relative clause was long. (Author/CB)

Argues that children's OV utterances cannot be related transformationally to VO utterances because children initially acquire OV and VO with different sets of verbs, and also argues that L2 acquisition data can be accounted for within a model of L1 structural transfer, without requiring adult learner access to Universal Grammar. (Author/LMO)

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignments of words to lexical and functional item categories. Results show that sets of distributional, phonological, and acoustic cues distinguishing lexical and functional items are…

A longitudinal study was conducted using 18 mildly/moderately retarded 14- and 15-year-olds to investigate word knowledge acquisition and subcategorization features of the words. Retarded children's errors were highly correlated with word frequency. Two interpretations (gradual acquisition of word knowledge and a reorganization theory) are…

A variety of types of evidence are examined to help determine the true nature of "deep structure" and what, if any, implications this has for linguistic theory as well as culture theory generally. The evidence accumulated over the past century on the nature of phonetic and phonemic systems is briefly discussed, and the following areas of…

The collection of essays and studies concerning generative grammar and first and second language acquisition includes: "The Optional-Infinitive Stage in Child English: Evidence from Negation" (Tony Harris, Ken Wexler); "Towards a Structure-Building Model of Acquisition" (Andrew Radford); "The Underspecification of…