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Showing 1 to 15 of 46 results Save | Export
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Uli Sauerland; Marie-Christine Meyer; Kazuko Yatsushiro – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…
Descriptors: Toddlers, German, Child Language, Form Classes (Languages)
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Nguyen, An D.; Legendre, Geraldine – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Language Acquisition, Questioning Techniques, Preschool Children
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Babineau, Mireille; Havron, Naomi; Dautriche, Isabelle; de Carvalho, Alex; Christophe, Anne – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary Development, Language Processing
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Natalie G. Koval – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
Research utilizing morphological priming has found that L2 speakers show facilitation from derived L2 primes, which could suggest morphological processing during derived L2 word recognition. However, the process of L2 derived word recognition is still poorly understood, with some arguing that the observed priming effects may not be morphological…
Descriptors: English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Word Recognition, Native Language
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Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in…
Descriptors: Grammar, Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Decision Making
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Mateu, Victoria Eugenia – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2020
The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…
Descriptors: Spanish Speaking, Intervention, Difficulty Level, English
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Celina Agostinho; Anna Gavarró; Ana Lúcia Santos – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…
Descriptors: Verbs, Grammar, Portuguese, Language Universals
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Aravind, Athulya; Koring, Loes – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
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…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Syntax
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Na Gao; Peng Zhou; Stephen Crain – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin interpret negative sentences with the conjunction ("he" 'and'). Our experiments test three predictions that follow from the proposal that the Mandarin conjunction is a positive polarity item (PPI) for both children and adults. On this account, the Mandarin conjunction should be interpreted…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Prediction, Form Classes (Languages), Phrase Structure
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Fodor, Janet Dean – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
An evaluation measure (EM) guides a learner's choice of grammar when more than one is compatible with available input. EM must be universal, so children receiving comparable input acquire comparable grammars. It must favor the choices children actually make. The theoretical shift from rule-based grammars to principles-and-parameter-based grammars…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar
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Rastelli, Stefano – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…
Descriptors: Adults, Second Language Learning, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory
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John Grinstead; Ramón Padilla-Reyes; Melissa Nieves-Rivera; Morgan Oates – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective…
Descriptors: Child Language, Goodness of Fit, Sentences, Prediction
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Kim, Sujeong; Ko, Heejeong; Yang, Hyun-Kwon – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2020
Resultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Contrastive Linguistics, Semantics, Syntax
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Angelopoulos, Nikos; Bagioka, Dafni-Vaia; Terzi, Arhonto – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others' authority or mental perspective, where "others" stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Morphology (Languages), Age Differences
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Geçkin, Vasfiye; Thornton, Rosalind; Crain, Stephen – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2018
This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (English or) in negative sentences by Turkish- and German-speaking children. Both children and adults were asked to judge Turkish/German sentences corresponding to the English sentence "This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper." Children acquiring both languages…
Descriptors: Contrastive Linguistics, Turkish, Language Acquisition, German
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