We examine the second language (L2) acquisition of variable Spanish word order by first language (L1) speakers of English via the acquisition of unaccusative and transitive predicates in various focus-related contexts. We employ two bimodal linguistic tasks: (1) acceptability judgment task (B-AJT) and (2) appropriateness preference task (B-APT).…

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in development when children start using more complex linguistic skills. In this study, we explore how children's ability to reflect on their degree of…

We examine whether German children attach an adultlike relevance to the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (e.g., "In my picture the child IS eating the candies" following after "In my picture the child is not eating the candies") with linguistic expressions (i.e., the affirmative particles…

Purpose: Previous studies reported that children acquire Cantonese tones before 3 years of age, supporting the assumption in models of phonological development that suprasegmental features are acquired rapidly and early in children. Yet, recent research found a large disparity in the age of Cantonese tone acquisition. This study investigated…

This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children's sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children's understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the…

The current study examined five- and seven-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's processing of lexical tones in relation to speech segments by varying onset and rime in an oddity task (onset±rime±). Results showed that children experienced more difficulty in lexical tone oddity judgment when rimes differed across monosyllables (e.g.…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…

This article investigates the acquisition of object shift in Norwegian child language. We show that object shift is complex derivationally, distributionally, and referentially, and propose a new analysis in terms of IP-internal topicalization. The results of an elicited production study with 27 monolingual Norwegian-speaking children (ages…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…