How do children infer the meaning of a novel verb? One prominent proposal is that children rely on syntactic information in the linguistic context, a phenomenon known as "syntactic bootstrapping". For example, given the sentence "The bunny is gorping the duck," a child could use knowledge of English syntactic roles to infer…

Based on the bilingual children's and adults' code-switching (CS) dependency treebanks, this paper investigates the syntactic features and pragmatic functions of the Chinese-English bilingual children's CS and compares them with bilingual adults'. It is mainly found that (1) As to the bilingual children, the mixed sentences present the longest…

This case study describes the use of a syntax intervention with two deaf children who did not acquire a complete first language (L1) from birth. It looks specifically at their ability to produce subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure in American Sign Language (ASL) after receiving intervention. This was an exploratory case study in which…

The purpose of this study was to compare the types of morphological and syntactic errors in written simple and complex sentences produced by children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with typical language (TL). We analyzed the writing products of 30 children with DLD and 33 children with TL for morphological (e.g., past…

We investigate concrete acquisition theories for a derived approach to linking theory development and explore to what extent two prominent linking theories in the syntactic literature--UTAH and rUTAH--can be derived from the data that English-learning children encounter. We leverage a conceptual acquisition framework that specifies key aspects of…

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained,…

Attitude verbs like "think" and "want" describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

This paper explores the nature of copula omission in Cypriot Greek individuals with Down Syndrome (DS). Previous studies on DS have attributed high rates of copula omission to an overall grammatical/inflectional impairment without offering further analysis. In order to identify relevant conditioning factors, we examined copula productions and…

This article provides an overview of the research on morpho-syntactic challenges in Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD), compared with typically developing (TD) children learning Swedish as their first and second language (L1/L2). Children with DLD show vulnerabilities with verb finiteness, the possessive…

Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) show delays in Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Complement sentences such as "Eliane says that Santa Clause exists" influence ToM performance. Can a training program targeting sentential complements enhance ToM? Twenty-one French-speaking DHH children (M[subscript age] = 8 years 11 months)…

Purpose: This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language…

Purpose: Child language acquisition is marked by an optional infinitive period (ages 2-4 years) during which children use nonfinite (infinitival) verb forms and finite verb forms interchangeably in grammatical contexts that require finite forms. In English, children's errors include omissions of past tense /--ed/ and 3rd-person singular /--s/.…

Background: Children with language disorder across languages have problems with verb morphology. The nature of these problems varies according to the typology of the language. The language analyzed in this paper is the Standard Bangla spoken in Dhaka, Bangladesh, by more than 200 million people. It is an underexplored language with agglutinative…

Purpose: Several studies have reported that "useful speech" at 5 years of age predicts outcomes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but this skill has been vaguely defined. This study investigates which specific aspects of expressive language in children with ASD best predict adult language and communication outcomes.…