Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

The present study looks into the largely unexplored territory of the cognitive underpinnings of semantic approximations in child language. The analysis of a corpus of 233 semantic approximations produced by 101 monolingual French-speaking children from 1;8 to 4;2 years of age leads to a classification of a significant number of them as instances…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

The present study examines the association of micro- and macrostructural components in narrative retells within and across languages in Spanish-English bilingual Latino kindergarten children. Using a within-subject research design, fourteen Spanish-English speaking Latino kindergarten children were individually read a scripted picture book, after…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of age and family socioeconomic status (SES) on the evaluative language performance of Mandarin-Chinese-speaking young children and their mothers. The participants were 65 mother-child dyads recruited in Taiwan. Thirty-four of these dyads were from middle-class families and 31 were from…

Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese,…

For professionals working with multilingual children, detecting language deficits in a child's home language can present a challenge. This is largely due to the scarcity of standardized assessments in many children's home languages and missing normative data on multilingual language acquisition. A common approach is to translate existing English…

Investigations of early vocabulary production often employ a single method to measure children's word use. This study examined expressive vocabulary development in children aged 1;0-2;6 years through a combination of picture naming, caregiver report and language sampling. The participants were predominantly exposed to Maltese at home, with…

An area in need of study in child language acquisition is that of complex multilingual contexts in which there is little language separation by interlocutor or domain. Little is known about how multilingual children use language to construct their identities in each language or in both languages. Identity construction in monolingual contexts has…

There are many postulates of a relation between quality of attachment with theory of mind and language functions (e.g., de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006). The current study examined in longitudinal design how different patterns of attachment are associated with usage of internal state language at ages 17, 23, 30 and 36 months. Transcripts of mother-child…