This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of…

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…

Many sentences of adult English are analytic constructions, namely clauses with a matrix verb complemented by a dependent predicate that does not have an expressed syntactic subject. Examples are subject and object control, raising to subject or object, periphrastic tense, aspect and modality, copular predication and "do"-support. In…

We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments.…

The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child's sentence final particle (SFP) "ba", in which we…

Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese-English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller's hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between…

This study explored Mandarin-speaking mothers' referential choice in relation to informativeness. The data consisted of two Mandarin-speaking mothers' natural conversation with their children, collected when the children were between the ages of 2;2 and 3;1. The subject and object arguments of the mothers' utterances were coded for the categories…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

The goal of this dissertation is to address several major empirical and theoretical issues related to English-speaking children's difficulties with auxiliary use and inversion in questions. The empirical data on English question acquisition are inconsistent due to differences in methods and techniques used. A range of proposals about the source of…

English-speaking children make pronoun case errors producing utterances where accusative pronouns are used in nominative contexts ("me do it"). We investigate whether complex utterances in the input ("Let me do it") might explain the origin of these errors. Longitudinal naturalistic data from seventeen English-speaking two- to four-year-olds was…

This study examined information about adjective meanings available in adults' spoken discourse in the original 27 CHILDES corpora of typically developing English-speaking children. In order to increase the probability that adjectives would be novel to children to whom they were addressed, only "rare" adjectives were examined (those that occurred…