From a corpus of over 47,000 spontaneous utterances from four nonstuttering preschool children who were beginning to use syntax, 4,881 multiword, disfluent utterances were identified. Semantic-syntactic structures were identified among the disfluent multiword utterances, and differences in frequency of structures were examined. (Author)

Ten nonretarded preschoolers and 10 mildly mentally retarded children (mean age 8 years) were compared for control over various syntactic structures. The retarded children evidenced difficulties similar to those of younger nonretarded children. (Author/SB)

In two studies, two year olds learned a novel word for a particular stuffed animal. When the animal was familiar, children interpreted the novel word as a proper noun. When the animal was unfamiliar, children frequently interpreted the novel word as a count noun referring to a kind of object. (BC)

Investigates acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish. Indicates that rich agreement morphology is not a sufficient condition for noun-drop. Supports a model of the human language faculty in which points of syntactic variation are not fully reducible to the overt inflectional and declensional morphology. (Author/VWL)

Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. Cognition, 89, B65-B73.] claim experimental substantiation of an argument from the poverty of the stimulus, in the sense of Pullum and Scholz [Linguist. Rev. 19 (2002) 9].…

Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, [lsquo ]real[rsquo ] two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the…

As an occasional visitor to the land of SLA, I found myself somewhat mystified by the approach of Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth TSS). Unless I have totally misunderstood them, they are arguing against the separate existence of both a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) and a Universal Grammar (UG). But who ever thought they were two?…

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the…

This study aims to describe in detail the linguistic skills of a large group of SLI participants. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of age-related effects on their linguistic performance and to whether a linguistic assessment of a narrative task can capture language impairments that might not be adequately pointed out by standardized…

English learners of French whose first language (L1) does not mark the perfective/imperfective distinction have shown verb semantic influence and an overall preference for perfective over imperfective in their use of second language (L2) tense-aspect markers. This study investigated whether learners whose L1 marks the perfective/imperfective…

Books can be a rich source of learning for children and adults alike. In the present study, the contribution of shared reading and parent literacy to a variety of child outcomes was tested. Child outcomes included measures of expressive vocabulary, morphological and syntax comprehension, and narrative ability (story grammar, cohesion, and language…

The spontaneous use of two deictic forms in the speech of Samoan children was examined. Recordings were made of four Samoan children interacting with their families at monthly intervals over a ten-month period. The children were approximately 2 years old at the start of the study. The speech elements examined were the particles signifying…

The form and function of conditional structures in the speech of English speaking children between the ages of 2;6 and 8 years were investigated. Two types of conditionals were distinguished: reality conditionals and unreality conditionals. Data were obtained from audiotapes of the subjects under naturalistic conditions. A five-stage acquisition…

Examined the syntactic language skills of 48 sixth and ninth graders. Student narratives were analyzed for differences in syntax, T-unit length, clause length, and clause usage. Findings indicated statistically significant differences between groups in the words per T-unit and the words per clause used in the narratives. Differences were not found…

Reports outcomes of three experiments in which children were taught a sentence form that they did not as yet understand. Investigates whether (1) acquisition of word order relations for sentence form would be affected by pragmatic ordering principles and (2) whether referent animacy would be included in children's rules for word order. (Author/BE)