It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

The acquisition of the function of case-marking is a key step in the development of sentence processing for German-speaking children since case-marking reveals the relations between sentential arguments. In this study, we investigated the development of the processing of case-marking and argument structures in children at 3, 4;6 and 6 years of…

A total of 34 children, ages 2 and a half to 6, were presented with sentences for imitation that either violated or honored a prenominal adjective ordering rule, which requires that size adjectives must precede color adjectives. Two response measures were evaluated in terms of these sentence types: latency to begin a sentence imitation and recall…

Uncertainty scores of the type proposed in this study, if suitably refined, may measure the developmental progression from stereotyped reliance on individual syntactic forms to flexible utilization of productive rules. (Authors/CB)

In this study, we investigate children's and adults' relative clause attachment preferences in sentences such as "The student photographed the fan of the actress who was looking happy." Twenty-nine 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children and 37 adult native speakers of English participated both in an auditory questionnaire study and in an…

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…

Investigates the similarities and differences in individual approaches to the linguistic organization of narrative. The study identified strategies used, including thematic subject, nominal and anaphoric. Findings reveal that a variety of strategies was adopted by all age groups and that ability to maintain a strategy across the narrative's…