Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

Purpose: The current study used an intervention design to test the hypothesis that parent input sentences with diverse lexical noun phrase (NP) subjects would accelerate growth in children's sentence diversity. Method: Child growth in third person sentence diversity was modeled from 21-30 months (n = 38) in conversational language samples obtained…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

Explores the possibility that particular properties of how number words are used within sentences inform children of the semantic class to which they belong. Analysis of transcripts of the spontaneous speech of three children and their parents suggests that the relevant cues are available as input in parents' speech to children and that children…

Recent research indicates that interaction patterns between parent and child change according to the increasing language skill of the child. These patterns are linguistically summarized here. All are correlated with the child's age, but many relationships are still unexplored. (Author/KM)

The frequency with which a child's parents use a given linguistic form has been considered influential in language development. This hypothesis has been challenged, however, notably by Ervin (1964) and Brown (1973). The frequency hypothesis makes the assumptions that: (1) children are not selective in what they attend to, (2) they listen to most…

A study tested the hypothesis that if, for the 2-year-old, the transitive/intransitive distinction functions to signal differences in the conceptualization of actions, the child's sentence production should show a relationship between sentence frame and (1) locus of change animacy and (2) the child's expectations concerning an action's outcome.…

The feedback model of maternal language indicates that maternal language development is tailored to child feedback. The conversational model indicates that adjustment in mothers' speech occurs before the onset of child language. In order to verify the validity of these models, the language of mothers of six hearing and six deaf 13- to…

A study is reported that investigated American children's use of subjects in early speech and compared this cross-sectional data to longitudinal data on Italian children's production of subjects. Twenty-one American children aged 1.10 to 2.8 years were recorded in mother-child interactions and grouped by mean length of utterance (MLU) produced.…

The project described in this report examines the development of Swedish-speaking children's syntax from the appearance of the first two-work sentences until all the basic syntactical rules are mastered. The procedures and techniques for the experiment are described and preliminary findings are discussed. Children practice language by repeating an…

Two possible iconic models of the acquisition of verb agreement in American Sign Language (ASL) are developed and contrasted with a third, morphological account of the acquisition of this aspect of ASL. Additionally, data from spontaneous conversation of deaf children who have deaf parents are considered to test these three models. An iconic model…