Purpose: Production of complex syntax is a hallmark of later language development; however, most of the research examining age-related changes has focused on adolescents or analyzed narrative language samples. Research documenting age-related changes in the production of complex syntax in elementary school-aged children in conversational language…

Purpose: The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard…

Background: One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can…

Purpose: The Arabic verb system features a nonlinear root and pattern derivational morphology. Previous studies suggest that young Arabic and Hebrew speakers' early verb use is based on semantic complexity rather than derivational morphological structure. The present study examines the role of morphological and semantic complexity in the emergence…

Support (one object preventing another from falling) is linguistically encoded by adults and children in a highly structured and differentiated way, with basic locative expressions or Light verbs (e.g., in English, the block is "on/put" on the box) encoding Support-from-Below, and lexical verbs (e.g., she "stuck" the block on…

Purpose: The present study evaluated the applicability of the sentence-focused framework to Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the relative contribution of receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes to later grammatical complexity. Method: Participants were 51 Mandarin-speaking children who received cochlear…

Objective: Compared to nouns, the impairment of the capacity of retrieving verbs in spoken production is much less documented. In the clinical field, there are also very few tests that have been developed specifically for verb anomia. Clinicians and researchers lack a concise and practical naming test to assess verb anomia, a condition that can…

This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb…

This paper investigates whether typical stress patterns in English nouns and verbs are available as a prosodic cue for categorisation and accelerated word learning during first language acquisition. The stress typicality hypothesis states that left-stressed nouns and right-stressed verbs should be acquired earlier than the reverse configurations…

It has long been noted that verb phrase (VP) ellipsis cancels the polarity sensitivity of the English Positive Polarity Items (PPIs). In recent work, it has been proposed that words for disjunction are governed by a parameter. On one value of the parameter, disjunction is a PPI for adult speakers of many languages including Mandarin Chinese. On…

Studies of the acquisition of verbs tend to focus on one-verb predicates of the prevalent English type. But in hundreds of languages around the world, multi-verb predicates like serial verb constructions are widely used. It could be reasoned that children should begin producing simple, single-verb predicates before they are able to produce…

This dissertation presents the judgment of what is 'correct' American Sign Language (ASL) structure by the younger generation, using the word order strategies that were used in older generation signers, as well as younger generation attitudes towards the ideology of ASL being a SOV language. This study used an on-line survey to evaluate 83…

It has long been believed across languages that the "Agent-First" strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the…

Adopting the framework of projection from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the present study explored the deployment of projection in summary writing by three levels of college EFL learners from a university in mainland China. Data were collected from one summary writing by three classes of different levels' learners in an English program from a…

The present study examines the development of the earliest type of complex predicates to emerge in child Hebrew -- extended predicate constructions. These constructions take the form of a modal/aspectual operator followed by an infinitival verb form (e.g., "roce lesaxek" 'want to.play'), and since they serve various discursive functions…