The aim of the present research is to investigate the development of left and right dislocation in child French through a corpus study of three children until age 2;7 from the corpus of Lyon (Demuth & Tremblay, 2008). We extracted a total of 704 dislocations and analysed their syntactic properties. We show that (i) right dislocations are more…

Purpose: The results of automatic machine scoring of the Index of Productive Syntax from the Computerized Language ANalysis (CLAN) tools of the Child Language Data Exchange System of TalkBank (MacWhinney, 2000) were compared to manual scoring to determine the accuracy of the machine-scored method. Method: Twenty transcripts of 10 children from…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

The current study examined preschool children's ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, "every" and "no." When "no" precedes "every," the entailment pattern typically licensed by "every" changes, but only if "no"…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we…

It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

Children between the ages of 6 and 11 learn to understand and use the relative pronouns "qui" and "que." The closer the subordinate clause is to favorite word order, the easier it is for the child. (MLA)

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)

This paper reports an investigation into the acquisition of indirect object constructions by English children aged 5-10. Sentences having a prepositional "to" phrase containing the indirect object, and following the direct object, were acquired before sentences where the indirect object preceded the direct object. (CHK)

Research is reported in which children were tested for their comprehension of four types of sentences with relative clauses. The Parallel Function Hypothesis is proposed, and implications for adult grammar are discussed. (Author/RM)

Two studies examined the development of major properties of reflexives and pronouns in English language acquisition by applying the theory of binding of reflexives and pronouns to potential antecedents in the sentence. The children ranged in age from 2.6 to 6.6 years. In the first experiment, the children were presented with two pictures and were…

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

Special issue devoted to research and the teaching of French in the elementary school. (VM)

A study investigated young children's knowledge of the constraint that prevents questioning from a position inside a temporal adjunct: i.e., knowledge of the ungrammaticality of a question such as "Who did Fred kiss Sue before hugging...?" Subjects were 30 children aged 3 to 5 years, who listened to stories accompanied by pictures and…