We investigated toddlers' understanding of the hierarchical syntactic configurations that constrain the referential meanings of reflexives and pronouns. In particular, reflexives must co-refer with the c-commanding antecedent within the local domain (Principle A) (e.g., He[subscript i] washes himself[subscript i]. John[subscript i] knows that…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

We discuss the causative-inchoative alternation in Turkish Sign Language (Türk Isaret Dili -- TID), and the age of acquisition effects on multi-predicate, complex constructions that are observed in both causative and inchoative events. We present a picture-description task performed by 24 adult signers, half of which were exposed to TID from birth…

Previous comprehension studies using Picture Matching Tasks (PMT) have shown that, by the age of four, Spanish-speaking children have acquired the semantics of "estar" being able to calculate the implicature that a property introduced with "estar" does not hold independent of time as well as displaying some ability to integrate…

How do children learn the meaning of words like "pretty" and "tall," which are not only gradable and context dependent (Kennedy & McNally 2005), but encode speaker subjectivity? Despite their complex semantics (Stephenson 2007; Lasersohn 2009; Bylinina 2014), these and other adjectives like them, are some of the most…

Relative clauses (RCs) are complex syntactic structures because they consist of multiple clauses and involve syntactic movement. RCs are known as a reliable clinical marker of syntactic impairment across many different languages and populations. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with the comprehension and production of RCs,…

The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n =…

Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children's verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could…

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical…

Languages vary according to which morphosyntactic forms of embedding are present in the grammar as well as to which of these forms allow recursive embedding. The present study examines how German-speaking children discover which forms of embedding are recursive. In German, possessive modifiers are expressed by several structural options (i.e.,…

Language and numerical development are associated in early childhood. In the present study, we focused on the association of the development of children's cardinality understanding of small numbers and their knowledge on unspecific quantifiers (i.e., many, a few). In a longitudinal study, we pursued the research question whether children's…

Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations ("particles") and adjectival resultatives ("ARs"). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter ("TCP"). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has…