Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb…

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…

This study examined on-line processing of Swedish sentences in a grammaticality-judgement experiment within the framework of the Competition Model. Three age groups from 6 to 11 and an adult group were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors concerning cue cost were studied: violation position (early vs. late),…

Examines effect of training 70 preschool children with animate agent + animate patient sentences (AAV) or animate agent + inanimate patient sentences (IAV). Children were tested with noun-noun-verb (NNV) order sentence to assess whether AAV or IAV produced better comprehension. AAV and IAV showed comparable results at age three, IAV resulted in…

This article discusses a study by Segalowitz and Galang that reports results showing better mastery of patient-focus sentences than agent-focus sentences for Tagalog children. (CFM)

Children aged 2;0 to 4;4, including native speakers of English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish, were asked to demonstrate causative statements by acting them out with toy animals and dolls. The major analysis focused on the total number of correct acting-out responses and the way this score related to several variables. Performance improved…