Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…

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 aimed at investigating the similarities and differences between Vygotsky's perspectives on child language development with nativism and behaviorism. Proposing the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky emphasized the role of collaborative interaction, scaffolding, and guided participation in language learning. Nativists, on…

This paper is concerned with a specific case of L3 acquisition: the starting position for English vowel acquisition by infant German-Italian bilinguals will be investigated in light of prototype theory. The chosen example of triple language contact is characterised by consecutive bilingualism as the basis of L3 acquisition, where the learners' L2…

Discusses the possibility of a neurolinguistic interconnection between the parieto-temporo-occipital junction, semantic aphasis, and cognitive and language development around age seven. (Author/HP)

THE AUTHOR FEELS THAT TO APPROACH CHILD LANGUAGE TRANSFORMATIONALLY IS TO USE A TECHNIQUE SUITED TO PROVIDING ADDITIONAL INSIGHT INTO A WELL-KNOWN LANGUAGE FOR TREATING AN UNKNOWN, OR AT BEST LITTLE KNOWN LANGUAGE. SHE MAKES THE FOLLOWING CRITICISMS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD LANGUAGE--(1) NOTHING CAN BE DIRECTLY INFERRED WITH REGARD TO…

This unannotated bibliography deals primarily with questions concerning a child's acquisition of language and lists references dating from 1250-1967, reporting research from America, Western and Eastern Europe, and, to a lesser extent, from Japan. The main section of the book is an alphabetical listing of works on the subject of child language…

This paper represents a partial condensation of the results of a study covering 14 months in a Russian-speaking child's phonological development. Evidence supports a theory of phonological acquisition formulated by Olmsted (1971), and offers detailed information on the child's acquisition of specific phones. (CHK)

This paper outlines a proposal to cover four very early stages for the acquisition of negation systems in natural languages. It emphasizes the formal linguistic devices as the major variables that determine the various language-specific developmental sequences. (CHK)

This paper, based on naturalistic data, describes the acquisitional course and use of the articles "a" and "the" in young English-speaking children (18-61 months), with special emphasis on the role of individual variation. A growth modeling approach to the data reveals that children's individual acquisition schedules are similar in trend, but vary…

Investigates the 10% to 20% null subject stage in 3-year-olds in Germany and shows that this stage, though long, is not final. Findings indicate that children in this phase use structures found neither in the state of early null subjects nor in adult German, namely, postverbal referential null subjects. Further study is proposed. (94 references)…

This article summarizes early work on child language learning and reviews more recent work. It appears that recent research shows that children's linguistic cues, spoken by adults, are slower, less varied and more concrete than adult-adult speech. (Available from North-Holland Publishing Co., P. O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) (CHK)

An experiment on children aged 2 to 7 led to a critical evaluation of Piaget's implicit contention that young children use determiners anaphorically. It is suggested that the importance of young children's processing procedures on the linguistic environment has been underestimated in Piaget's interactive epistemology. (CHK)

Argues that early French relative clauses (RCs) with gaps involve movement of the relative head. The article suggests that children lack relative operators for maturational reasons. This account shows that the deviation of early RCs from adult grammar is due to this lacuna and is compensated for in a manner consistent with Universal Grammar. (39…