Explains the differences between constituency and dependency theories for structural linguistics. Reasons are provided for why the former has been indirectly responsible for the neglect of lexical acquisition in language acquisition research and for proposing a notation based on dependency theory for describing learners' segmentation of initially…

This study examined nonstandard syntactic and morphological forms used by 45 poor, urban, 4- to 5.5-year-old African American children. Distributional analyses revealed three subgroups distinguished by the percentage frequencies of occurrence of utterances containing specific forms and by the predominant types used by each group. (Author)

Presents a longitudinal case study of a child with a phonological disorder. Demonstrates an asymmetrical pattern of consonant cluster development with two different reduction strategies. Argues that the child first represents all clusters as single underlying units, later representing only certain clusters as single units. Formulated within…

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)

Explores the possibility that the early predominance of infinitival forms in children acquiring Dutch as their first language is related to patterns in the language input. Analyzed a corpus of utterances addressed by two Dutch-speaking mothers to their 2- and 3-year-old sons. Root infinitive utterances amounted to 10%, and auxiliary-plus…

A longitudinal study of 12 children (ages 1-3), investigated why some prefer to replace "I" with "me", whereas others prefer to replace "I" with "my". The percentage of errors in which "me" replaced "I" was positively correlated with the correct production of "me" as an objective pronoun. (Author/CR)

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly…

We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher…

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be…

A study of second language acquisition focuses on the transition from formulaic to creative speech patterns. Subjects were two native Japanese-speaking children, aged 4 and 8, learning English as a Second Language in New York, observed over a period of 2 years. The nature of formulaic speech is discussed, drawing from research on such speech and…

A variety of informal language development assessment tools is presented for use with children with developmental disabilities. This book is written as a manual for clinicians and researchers for evaluating children who cannot meet the cognitive, perceptual, or motor requirements of standardized tests and to help evaluate aspects of language not…

A study of the language use of 45 transitional Spanish-English bilinguals focused on subject pronoun usage patterns evolving when the bilingual has acquired both a prodrop (Spanish) and a non-prodrop (English) language and frequently switches between them. Subjects were of Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican background, and had not attained the…

A study designed to examine the variation that occurs in the request production of children between the ages of 6 and 7 observed the kind of requests children make, what they request, whom they ask, and how they formulate their ideas. Twenty native French-speaking children divided into two age groups (6- and 7-year-olds) were asked to complete two…

The language of twins allows researchers in language development to examine acquisition in a unique environment. Researchers investigating the nature-nurture controversy, the order of acquisition, and other linguistic features find the twin situation particularly interesting because of the children's shared genetic makeup and environment. A…

Five experiments are carried out to determine the comprehension of passives by children. Results obtained demonstrate that comprehension rests on knowledge of syntactic structure. V - NP were interpreted as verb-object. Passives lacking a preposition were interpreted as actives. Competence in passives may be at a high level before performance is…