Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

This study examines the "ba" and "bei" constructions in Mandarin using data from the Tong corpus, a new multimedia longitudinal child language corpus. A unified aspectual account of the two constructions is proposed: both require telic predicates, and should thus correlate with the perfective rather than imperfective aspect for…

This dissertation explores parallels between Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Determiner Phrase (DP) semantics, syntax, and morphology--including similarities in case-assignment, subject-verb and possessor-possessum agreement, subject and possessor semantics, and overall syntactic structure--in first language acquisition. Applying theoretical…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4-2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across the…

Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four…

Little research has been conducted on the development of suprasegmental characteristics of vocalizations in typically developing infants (TDI) and the role of audition in the development of these characteristics. The purpose of the present study was to examine the longitudinal development of fundamental frequency (F[subscript 0]) in eight TDI and…

Reanalyzes what the literature has taken to be children's productions of Gen subjects and argues that Gen subjects do not exist in child English. Suggests that what look like Gen subjects appear only in specific discourse contexts: contexts of contrastive focus or contexts of emphatic focus. (Author/VWL)

The spontaneous speech of 14 children aged 2;6 to 5;6 was recorded. One additional child provided longitudinal information from age 2;4 to 5;6. In a second study, 75 children were tested for mastery of hypothetical reference in a story-telling situation. The speech samples from Study 1 and the children's answers from Study 2 were analyzed for…

The aim of this article is two-fold: to test the Aspect Hypothesis, according to which the early use of tense-aspect morphology patterns by semantic/aspectual features of verbs, and Tense is initially defective (e.g. Antinucci and Miller, 1976; Bloom et al., 1980; Andersen and Shirai, 1994; 1996; Robison, 1995; Shirai and Andersen, 1995;…

The spontaneous speech of seven children was monitored for "wh" questions. The children were observed longitudinally from about age 24 to 36 months. The pattern of development with regard to the deletion of non-obligatory verbs revealed that "what,""where," and "who" questions presented increasing verb…

Reports results of a longitudinal study testing the acquisition of restrictions of the use of pronouns in children, first as 9 year olds and later as 11 year olds. (AM)

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age less than 33 weeks and/or birth weight less than 1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term…