Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children's pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking…

The acquisition of voice in Greek remains understudied, especially in heritage populations. Voice in Greek poses a challenging acquisition task for children due to its syncretism, marking various verb classes as well as passives. The present study explores the acquisition of anticausatives, reflexives, and passives in 6-to-8-year-old monolingual…

Previous research suggests that toddlers can rely on distributional cues in the input to track adjacent and nonadjacent grammatical dependencies. It remains unclear whether toddlers understand the hierarchical phrase structures that determine the corresponding grammatical dependencies. We addressed this question by testing toddlers on two…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…

The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to…

This study investigated 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of "wh"-questions, universal statements and free choice inferences. Previous research has found that Mandarin-speaking children assign a universal interpretation to sentences with a wh-word (e.g., "shei" 'who') followed by the adverbial quantifier…

The comprehension of paired wh-questions is examined in child Mandarin, to compare the age of acquisition with that of children speaking European languages like English and German. In Study 1, participants were 734 Mandarin speakers aged 2;6-7;11, drawn from four regions of China. Results reveal a striking parallel between the acquisition of…

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children's own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb and Abrahamson in J Child Lang 3(3):349-367, 1976); Clark and Sengul in J Child…

Syntactic structures are unobserved theoretical constructs which are useful in explaining a wide range of linguistic and psychological phenomena. Language acquisition studies how such latent structures are acquired by human learners through many hypothesized learning mechanisms and apparatuses, which can be genetically endowed or of general…

This article analyses how a set of psycholinguistic factors may account for children's lexical development. Age of acquisition is compared to a measure of lexical development based on vocabulary size rather than age, and robust regression models are used to assess the individual and joint effects of word class, frequency, imageability and…

Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities ("seven, most") and qualities ("red, spotty") present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding, not only of what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning…

This study examined the comprehension of actional and psychological verbs in both their active and passive (short and long) forms by 99 Serbian-speaking children. The children, whose age ranged between 3 years, 6 months (3;6) and 7 years, 6 months (7;6), were divided into three groups: 3;6-5 ("M" = 4.3), 5;1-6;1 ("M" = 5.6),…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of the passive. The apparent cross-linguistic delay of the verbal passive compared to other constructions suggests children's knowledge is somehow restricted, leading some to propose the difficulty arises because of syntactic maturation (Wexler 2004, Orfitelli 2012) or because of a heavy reliance…

In this study, the author investigates the telic/atelic distinction in adult and child Hebrew. Telicity is defined here in terms of culmination requirements, whereby telic predicates, but not atelic ones, have an inherent culmination point that must be reached in order for the predicate to be true. Motivated by a modular model of language, in…

The study aimed at investigating the role of nominal gender in animal categorization in preschoolers. Given the regularities characterizing gender system, at both syntactical and morphological level, Italian language is suitable to address this issue. In three experiments, participants were asked to classify pictures of animals as male or female.…