The goal of this study is to investigate the acquisition of causal relations with parce que "because" and temporal relations with quand "when" by children between age 3 and 5. We aim at identifying whether different discourse type, conversation and narration, allow children to use quand and parce que with different semantic…

This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking…

Background: Little is known about the spontaneous speech characteristics of young children with language delay in Mandarin, relative to their peers. Until the recent development of standardized language assessments normed in China on Mandarin-speaking children, it was difficult to independently identify atypically developing children to study…

Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…

Previous developmental studies of conjunction have focused on the syntax of phrasal and sentential coordination (Lust, 1977; de Villiers, Tager-Flusberg & Hakuta, 1977; Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980, among others). The present study examined the flexibility of children's interpretation of conjunction. Specifically, when two…

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…

This study was designed to examine the strength of question types to obligate complete responses from children, and the effect of age and play context. Participants were typically developing children (mean ages 2;8, 3;4 and 4;7), who engaged in play with three speech-language pathologists in play contexts. Questions posed to the children were…

Background: Despite studies of how parent-child interactions relate to early child language development, few have examined the continued contribution of parenting to more complex language skills through the preschool years. The current study explored how positive and negative parenting behaviours relate to growth in complex syntax learning from…

The current study examined preschool children's ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, "every" and "no." When "no" precedes "every," the entailment pattern typically licensed by "every" changes, but only if "no"…

The objective of this work was to analyze morphosyntactic development in a wide sample of children with Down syndrome (DS) ("n" = 92) and children with typical development (TD) ("n" = 92) with a mental age (MA) of 20 to 29 months. Children were individually matched for gender and MA (Analysis 1) and for vocabulary size…

This article investigates the acquisition of different types of clefts and of "be"-fragments in European Portuguese. We first present the main syntactic and discourse properties of different cleft structures and of "be"-fragments in European Portuguese, and we discuss how data from first language acquisition may contribute to…