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…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

This dissertation examined the role of maternal input in word order acquisition of Mandarin-speaking children from the one-word to multi-word stages. Four questions about the role of maternal input were addressed: frequency effects, age-related changes, utterance type effects, and verb diversity effects. Predictions for each question were made…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

One of the issues debated in the field of bilingualism is the question of a "critical period" for second language acquisition. Recent studies suggest an influence of age of onset of acquisition (AOA) particularly on syntactic processing; however, the processing of word order in a sentence context has not yet been examined specifically. We used…

Four studies examined 2- and 3-year olds' word order and verb morphology productivity. Findings indicated that younger children neither used nor comprehended word order with novel transitive verbs. Older children comprehended and used word order to mark verbs' agents and patients. Children as young as 25 months added "-ing" but not…

An examination of children's sentence structure in Korean argues for a verb phrase (VP) constituent in child grammar, but suggests that this does not necessarily support its existence in adult Korean grammar. Korean children, it is noted, generally restrict their sentences to one word order, subject-object-verb, despite the existence of another…