Examines the development of nominative and oblique subject pronouns in preschool speakers of English, finding that oblique subject forms occur in the earliest language of the children and reappear in connection with wh-questions and related constructions. (57 references) (MDM)

The process of pragmaticization is explored in a study of 46 adult English speakers learning Chinese as their second language. Results suggest that "ba" constructions that manifest certain grammatical features and are structurally dependent will be acquired earlier than those pragmatically controlled and contextually dependent. (12 references) (LB)

The concept of language learning disability is discussed in terms of such language components as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; input and output dimensions of language performance; information processing; and the social construction of meaning. (DB)

Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

Reports a case study of a British 2-year old that shows a stage in syntactic development without a subject agreement protection but with a tense phrase. A sharp contrast in use of verb forms suggests that the child had left the Optional Infinitive stage and entered a transitional stage, where the major development is that the status of the bare…

Explores the acquisition process of relative clauses in Japanese and Korean. Examines the issue of whether Korean "kes" and Japanese "no" found in Korean and Japanese relative clauses are each a complementizer or a head noun.(Author/VWL)

Explores two Mandarin-speaking children's ability to refer to the past in mother-child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. Results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. (Author/VWL)

Argues that functional categories instantiated in the learners' first language (L1) transfer to the initial state of second language syntactic development. On the basis of Zulu interlanguage data on acquisition of the obligatory declarative complementizer "ukuthi" (that) by English native speakers, argues that Comp contains a null…

Addresses the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues raised by the controversy between the single system and the separate development hypotheses. Set within a generative grammar framework, evidence on German/English and Latvian/English is presented from the earliest stages of language development. (Author/VWL)

Various commentaries are included in response to an article on filler syllables and their status in emerging grammar. (Author/VWL)

Expressive language outcomes measured by MLU and the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) at ages 3 and 4 were investigated in 34 late talkers with normal receptive language and in 16 typically developing comparison children matched on age, socioeconomic status, and nonverbal ability. Late talkers made greater gains than comparison children between…

Demonstrates that an understanding of children's language-acquisition difficulties with a wide range of syntactic constructions should be derived from limitations on the child's ability to deal with processing load and formal representational complexity. Maintains this can be done only in the context of a view of syntactic representation…

This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be…

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

A study analyzed the distribution of words in a three-million-word corpus of text from the "Wall Street Journal," in order to test a theory of the acquisition of word categories. The theory, an alternative to the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposes that the child exploits multiple sources of cues (distributional, semantic, or…