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Showing 1 to 15 of 94 results Save | Export
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Aravind, Athulya; Koring, Loes – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
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…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Syntax
Adam Liter – ProQuest LLC, 2022
This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…
Descriptors: Case Studies, Grammar, Linguistic Competence, Measurement Techniques
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Wang, Shuyan – Language Learning and Development, 2023
Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Mandarin Chinese, English, Short Term Memory
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Gupton, Timothy; Sánchez Calderón, Silvia – Second Language Research, 2023
We examine the second language (L2) acquisition of variable Spanish word order by first language (L1) speakers of English via the acquisition of unaccusative and transitive predicates in various focus-related contexts. We employ two bimodal linguistic tasks: (1) acceptability judgment task (B-AJT) and (2) appropriateness preference task (B-APT).…
Descriptors: Spanish, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Language Proficiency
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Pearl, Lisa; Ho, Timothy; Detrano, Zephyr – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
It has long been recognized that there is a natural dependence between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition, with the idea that the right knowledge representation enables acquisition to happen as reliably as it does. Given this, a reasonable criterion for a theory of knowledge representation is that it be…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Grammar, Qualitative Research
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Pearl, Lisa – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
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…
Descriptors: Generative Grammar, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Computational Linguistics
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Brandt, Silke; Nitschke, Sanjo; Kidd, Evan – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…
Descriptors: Priming, German, Phrase Structure, Linguistic Input
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Pelham, Sabra D. – Journal of Child Language, 2011
English-acquiring children frequently make pronoun case errors, while German-acquiring children rarely do. Nonetheless, German-acquiring children frequently make article case errors. It is proposed that when child-directed speech contains a high percentage of case-ambiguous forms, case errors are common in child language; when percentages are low,…
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Linguistic Input, Figurative Language, Child Language
Gerlach, Sharon Ruth – ProQuest LLC, 2010
This dissertation examines three processes affecting consonants in child speech: harmony (long-distance assimilation) involving major place features as in "coat" [kouk]; long-distance metathesis as in "cup" [p[wedge]k]; and initial consonant deletion as in "fish" [is]. These processes are unattested in adult phonology, leading to proposals for…
Descriptors: Language Patterns, Phonemes, Phonology, Language Acquisition
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Jarosz, Gaja – Journal of Child Language, 2010
This study examines the interacting roles of implicational markedness and frequency from the joint perspectives of formal linguistic theory, phonological acquisition and computational modeling. The hypothesis that child grammars are rankings of universal constraints, as in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004), that learning involves a…
Descriptors: Syllables, Linguistic Theory, Computational Linguistics, Child Language
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Choi, Youngon; Trueswell, John C. – Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2010
An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong…
Descriptors: Language Patterns, Child Language, Syntax, Cues
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Demuth, Katherine; McCullough, Elizabeth – Journal of Child Language, 2009
Researchers have long been puzzled by children's variable omission of grammatical morphemes, often attributing this to a lack of semantic or syntactic competence. Recent studies suggest that some of this variability may be due to phonological constraints. This paper explored this issue further by conducting a longitudinal study of five…
Descriptors: Syntax, Morphemes, English, Form Classes (Languages)
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Spenader, Jennifer; Smits, Erik-Jan; Hendriks, Petra – Journal of Child Language, 2009
Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a…
Descriptors: Sentences, Form Classes (Languages), Value Judgment, Indo European Languages
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Snow, David – Journal of Child Language, 2007
Previous studies have suggested that intonation development in infants and toddlers reflects an interaction between physiological and linguistic influences. The immediate background research for this study, however, was based on vocalizations that were only one syllable in length. By extending the analysis to polysyllabic utterances, the present…
Descriptors: Syllables, Intonation, Infants, Language Rhythm
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Legate, Julie Anne; Yang, Charles – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2007
In this article, we propose that the Root Infinitive (RI) phenomenon in child language is best viewed and explained as the interaction between morphological learning and syntactic development. We make the following specific suggestions: The optionality in RI reflects the presence of a grammar such as Chinese which does not manifest tense marking.…
Descriptors: Linguistic Theory, French, Child Language, Language Acquisition
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