This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

This study is an investigation of the acquisition of existential constructions (ECs) in English and in Spoken Arabic. It is the first of its kind in that it examines the acquisition of the pieces and the features that form ECs; namely, existential "there," the copula, definiteness, and agreement for English and existential "fii," definiteness,…

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…

A discussion of young children's production of English utterances with missing constituents focuses on the omission of subjects. The theory that young children have different grammars from those of adults is disputed, and it is suggested that, instead, subjects are omitted due to performance factors. Processing limitations in child language are…

In a study of the verbal environment, teachers' language was analyzed in two different interactive contexts: when interacting with a different number of interlocutors, and when talking to children of different linguistic competence. Results show that in both interactive contexts teachers tend to adapt their linguistic style to the characteristics…

A cross-linguistic comparison of syntax acquisition patterns examined preferential subject omission in the naturally-occurring speech of three Japanese toddlers from the Tokyo area and compared the findings to data on English acquisition. Results indicate that acquisition patterns of Japanese do not mirror those of English with regard to this…

Examines children's uses of nominal determiners ("local markings") and utterance structure ("global markings") to introduce new referents through the use of narratives elicited from preschoolers, elementary school students and adults in English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Findings reveal that local markings emerge first, and local and…

The journal of linguistics of the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland) contains information on the programs and faculty and articles in French (F) and English (E). They include: "From Behavioral Psychology to Sociolinguistics: Ten Years of Linguistics Applied to Language Teaching at Neuchatel" (F); "Intonation and Syntax:…

Papers (entirely in French) presented at the conference on linguistics include these topics: language used in the legislature of New Brunswick; cohesion in the text of Arabic-speaking language learners; automatic adverb recognition; logic of machine translation in teaching revision; expansion in physics texts; discourse analysis and the syntax of…