Background: We discuss a free software system (Computerized Language Analysis [CLAN]) that can enable fast, thorough, and informative language sample analysis (LSA). Method: We describe methods for eliciting, transcribing, analyzing, and interpreting language samples. Using a hypothetical child speaker, we illustrate use KidEval to generate a…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to document whether mean length of utterance[subscript SUGAR] (MLU[subscript S]), total number of words (TNW), clauses per sentence (CPS), and/or words per sentence (WPS) demonstrated age-related changes in children with typically developing language, aged 7;0-10;11 (years;months). Method: Participants were…

This paper provides the first evidence of maternal speech--motherese--in Wichi, an indigenous language with a complex morphology spoken in the Gran Chaco region of Argentina. The corpus consists of 22 hours of video recordings from the daily life of three children, starting from their one-morpheme utterance period (MLU = 1) to the onset of…

This study scrutinizes the development of negation in Turkish by analyzing of a monolingual Turkish-speaking child's speech between 28 to 32 months. The developmental progress of negative forms in parent-child exchanges is explained and presented with examples featuring a girl and her parents. The data has been obtained from the CHILDES database…

Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency,…

The present study investigated children's early use of verb inflection in Japanese by comparing a generativist account, which predicts that the past tense will have a special default-like status for the child during the early stages, with a constructivist input-driven account, which assumes that children's acquisition and use of inflectional forms…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

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…

Two recent proposals link the use of nonagreeing "don't" to the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage. Guasti & Rizzi (2002) argue for a misset parameter involving how agreement is spelled out. Schütze (2010) proposes that Infl is underspecified in child language and that "do" surfaces to support the contracted clitic/affix…

This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task).…

Generic sentences (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 91) use of…

The present study determined whether parenting style, defined by control strategies varying in power-assertion mediated the established relation between maternal language usage (grammar and semantics) and child language (grammar, semantics and pragmatics) during toddlerhood (n = 60). Based upon their use of control strategies mothers were…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have well-documented problems in the use of tense-related grammatical morphemes. However, in English, tense often overlaps with aspect and modality. In this study, 15 children with SLI (mean age 5;2) and two groups of 15 typically developing children (mean ages 3;6 and 5;3) were compared in terms of…