Models of monolingual literacy propose that reading acquisition builds upon children's semantic, phonological, and orthographic knowledge. The relationships between these components vary cross-linguistically, yet it is generally unknown how these differences impact bilingual children's literacy. A comparison between Spanish-English bilingual and…

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

Computational models have played a central role in the debate over language learnability. This article discusses how they have been used in different "stances", from generative views to more recently introduced explanatory frameworks based on embodiment, cognitive development and cultural evolution. By digging into the details of certain specific…

Recent findings in developmental psycholinguistics have shown that below the age of eight children have difficulty in understanding English sentences that do not conform to normal SVO pattern (Chomsky, 1969). Experiments with French-speaking children are reported which duplicate and extend this research. (Editor)

Four- to 10-year olds viewed pictures in which all or some individuals pictured were doing something to all or some objects pictured. Children indicated which sentences, using "all" or "each" to modify the subject or object, applied to the pictures. In choosing the applicable sentence, children showed little difficulty with…

Presents a study that originated from a sociolinguistic research project in Mexico City during interviews with six to seven year old children from sub-proletarian groups. The study focuses on the inability of the children to distinguish between "preguntar" and "decir" ("to ask" and "to tell"). (MES)

An analysis of sentence grammar is made to show that the ability to produce coherent texts emerges slowly and late in linguistic and cognitive development. (HP)

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to determine universals of grammatical development in children. On the basis of language acquisition data, a limited number of findings are presented in the form of suggested developmental universals. These universals are grouped according to the psychological variables which may determine them, in the…

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. (VM)

Investigations were made of the development of (1) children's abilities to produce and interpret requests with nuances, and (2) the ability to identify requests as being "bossy" or "nice." In the first study, the development of children's ability to produce bossy and nice requests and the linguistic means by which they do so…

This article examines child acquisition of syntax through a chronological distributional analysis. The main point is that the development of syntactic relations is neither behaviorist nor pre-programmed but dynamic, and that therefore child linguistic development cannot be described in terms of an innate adult language ideal. (Text is in French.)…

To the question of whether Chomsky's hypothesized Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in young children is an adequate and feasible model of language acquisition, this paper answers that LAD should be reformulated so as to include semantics; that "informant presentation" rather than "text presentation" is responsible for language…

Forty-four children (mean 3.8 years) were given three false belief, a working memory, and four language tasks (each designed to tap a different aspect of syntax or semantics), and were tested again 6 months later. Once the range of scores in the language and false belief tasks were equated, there was a bidirectional relation between language and…