The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Reports on bilingual acquisition of syntax. Draws on data from a bilingual English-Dutch child whose word order patterns testify to the fact that movement never occurs beyond the target and when deviant word orders are attested they result from lack of raising. (Author/VWL)

The acquisition of morpheme-structure constraints by children is discussed. The focus is a subset of verbs in modern Hebrew and the language-specific knowledge that children acquire of what constitutes a possible verb in their language, from the point of view of both internal form and of categorical appropriateness for naming a certain semantic…

Re-analysis of data regarding children's acquisition of tense and aspect indicated that children learning Polish were influenced by aspect in acquiring verb tense in the same way as children were influenced in learning other languages. Children beginning to learn verb inflections found aspectual contour particularly compelling in leading them to…

Examines whether systematic differences exist in babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds (English, French, Japanese and Swedish) and asks whether differences result from the phonetic structure of the languages. Statistically significant differences discerned in the babbling phonetic selection indicates that phonetic…

Investigates the cross-linguistic patterns of the overgeneralization of the intransitive/transitive alternations found in children's speech and provides new evidence from findings based on the acquisition of French. The morphosyntatic characterization of such phenomena in English and Hebrew child language is followed by a description of the…

Analysis of longitudinal data on the phonetic development of Swedish infants (N=4) from 1 through 17 months of age showed five distinct stages in early vocalization development: glottal; velar/uvular; vocalic; reduplicated consonant babbling; and variegated consonant babbling. Comparison with infants of differing linguistic backgrounds indicated…

Luo-speaking children in Kenya responded to a test using nonce forms in morphophonology. Morphophonological processes in the acquisition of Luo plurals and possessives presented different degrees of difficulty for the subjects, with the type of morphophonological alteration in a language likely to affect the rate and order of acquisition.…

Examines the sound-to-letter patterns of misspelling in a Danish child at ages seven and eight by comparing his misspellings with transcriptions of his pronunciation. (MSE)

Analysis of Sesotho-speaking children's spontaneous language showed that the acquisition of passives was closely linked to the fact that Sesotho subjects must be discourse topics. It is suggested that a detailed analysis of how passive constructions interact with other components of a given linguistic system is critical for developing coherent and…

A report of research on phonology consists of two parts. The first examines the direction in which syllables are "built"--whether the segment or the syllable came first. The first part looks at the effects that different forms of syllabification have on syllable structure, and explores which syllable structure accounts for most…

Explores the possibility that the early predominance of infinitival forms in children acquiring Dutch as their first language is related to patterns in the language input. Analyzed a corpus of utterances addressed by two Dutch-speaking mothers to their 2- and 3-year-old sons. Root infinitive utterances amounted to 10%, and auxiliary-plus…

Examination of the phonological acquisition of a young girl whose parents spoke two Cantonese dialects indicated that she acquired neither parents' dialect, supporting the claim that children use all available input in acquiring language rather than limiting themselves to a primary language model. (Author/CB)

Examined the development of Irish word order patterns. It was found that the 1.5- to 3-year-olds (N=3) studied used subject-initial utterances more frequently than adults in input, and that for both adults and children the elision of the verb "to be" had a significant role in the placement of subjects in the utterances. (42 references)…

Basque auxiliary verbs encode tense, agreement relations with ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments, which constitute an inflectional verbal amalgam whose acquisition is not problematic for Spanish-speaking children but is for Spanish-speaking adults. This asymmetry is due to different processes by which the inflectional amalgam is acquired.…