To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Purpose: Language difficulties are prevalent among children born preterm. Existing studies have largely used standardized language tests, providing limited scope for detailed descriptive examination of preterm language. This study aimed to examine differences in conversational language between children born < 30 weeks and at term as well as…

Purpose: This tutorial is an introduction to first phase syntax (FPS; Ramchand, 2008). FPS provides a new, cross-linguistically motivated perspective on clause internal structure. A new sequence of syntactic development is proposed based on FPS with 4 levels of complexity: (0) verb particles and adjectives in the 1-word stage, (1) semantic…

In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting…

To understand how children develop adult argument structure, we must understand the nature of syntactic and semantic representations during development. The present studies compare the performance of children aged 2;6 on the two intransitive alternations in English: patient ("Daddy is cooking the food"/"The food is cooking")…

Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the "set of nouns" occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This…

An analysis of one theory of the acquisition of head movement by children is presented, using longitudinal data from the Mayan language, K'iche'. This theory assumes that children would just require positive evidence of head movement in the input language to instantiate the constructions of their own grammar. The Incorporation Theory addresses the…

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 x 3…

A group of studies on child language development between ages 2 and 3 is presented. The studies, originally published between 1970 and 1989, are the result of a longitudinal research program. An introductory section describes the contents, offers background information on several different perspectives (developmental, learnability, cross-cultural)…

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…