This dissertation investigates clitic doubling of both dative and accusative objects in adult and child language. It reports on three experimental studies designed to discover the specific distributional properties of this phenomenon, with particular attention to the effect of "rheme" and "kontrast," two distinct concepts often collapsed as…

Results imply that in early childhood education the language of test instructions and reading programs could be better geared to the child's linguistic competence. (Author)

Examined the strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning for simultaneous bilingual infants with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Findings revealed that the correlation was strong, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20% between observations.…

Examines the spontaneous speech of Portuguese-speaking two-year olds in natural conversation with Portuguese-speaking adults. The children were separated into three groups based on Mean Length of Utterance in Words (MLUW). The children in the highest-MLUW group almost perfectly matched the adult speakers on every measure. (37 references)…