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On the Universality of the Subject Preference in the Acquisition of Relative Clauses across Languages
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Nozomi Tanaka; Elaine Lau; Alan L. F. Lee – First Language, 2024
Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Native Language, Language Classification, Preferences
A Comparison of Picture-Based Narratives by Finnish, Italian and English-Speaking Children
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Mäkinen, Leena; Gabbatore, Ilaria; Loukusa, Soile; Kunnari, Sari; Schneider, Phyllis – Early Education and Development, 2020
Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…
Descriptors: Cross Cultural Studies, Narration, Child Development, English
How Do Language-Specifc Characteristics Affect the Acquisition of Different Relative Clause Types? Evidence from Finnish
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Kirjavainen, Minna; Kidd, Evan; Lieven, Elena – Journal of Child Language, 2017
We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Phrase Structure, Child Language, Computational Linguistics
Acquisition of Finnish Derivational Morphology: School-Age Children and Young Adults
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Vainio, Seppo; Pajunen, Anneli; Häikiö, Tuomo – First Language, 2019
The current study examined how morpho-semantic processing of derivational morphology develops from later childhood through adolescence to adulthood in Finnish. Finnish is a synthetic language rich both in derivation and inflection. It has been suggested that children gradually acquire the ability to process morphologically complex word structures.…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Finno Ugric Languages, Semantics, Morphemes
A Large-Scale Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Acquisition of Passive
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Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Haman, Ewa; de López, Kristine Jensen; Smoczynska, Magdalena; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Szczerbinski, Marcin; van Hout, Angeliek; Dabašinskiene, Ineta; Gavarró, Anna; Hobbs, Erin; Kamandulyte-Merfeldiene, Laura; Katsos, Napoleon; Kunnari, Sari; Nitsiou, Chrisa; Olsen, Lone Sundahl; Parramon, Xavier; Sauerland, Uli; Torn-Leesik, Reeli; van der Lely, Heather – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
This cross-linguistic study evaluates children's understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and…
Descriptors: Language Research, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Language Acquisition
Differences in Word Recognition between Early Bilinguals and Monolinguals: Behavioral and ERP Evidence
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Lehtonen, Minna; Hulten, Annika; Rodriguez-Fornells, Antoni; Cunillera, Toni; Tuomainen, Jyrki; Laine, Matti – Neuropsychologia, 2012
We investigated the behavioral and brain responses (ERPs) of bilingual word recognition to three fundamental psycholinguistic factors, frequency, morphology, and lexicality, in early bilinguals vs. monolinguals. Earlier behavioral studies have reported larger frequency effects in bilinguals' nondominant vs. dominant language and in some studies…
Descriptors: Evidence, Language Dominance, Morphology (Languages), Word Recognition
Early Vocabulary and Gestures in Estonian Children
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Schults, Astra; Tulviste, Tiia; Konstabel, Kenn – Journal of Child Language, 2012
Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Nouns, Prediction, Cognitive Processes
Locatum Structures and the Acquisition of Telicity
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Hodgson, Miren – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2010
This article presents a study of a between-subjects design experiment on the comprehension of telicity in simple telic predicates (e.g., "John filled the bucket") and locatum predicates (e.g., "the water filled the bucket") in L1 Spanish. Weist, Wysocka, and Lyytinen (1991) for English and Finnish, and Van Hout (1997, 1998b) for English and Dutch…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Form Classes (Languages), Spanish, Second Language Learning