Gender associations have been a long-standing research topic in psychological and social sciences. Although it is known that children learn aspects of gender associations at a young age, it is not well understood how they might emerge through the course of development. We investigate whether gender associations, such as the association of dresses…

This article reports on the acquisition of relative clauses in Tagalog, the most widely spoken language in the Philippines. A distinctive feature of Tagalog is a unique system of voice that creates competing patterns, each with different possibilities for relativization. This study of children's performance on agent and patient relative clauses in…

Purpose: Unlike traditional implicit approaches used to improve grammatical forms used by children with developmental language disorder, explicit instruction aims to make the learner consciously aware of the underlying language pattern. In this study, we compared the efficacy of an explicit approach to an implicit approach when teaching 3 novel…

This study used a prospective community-based sample to describe patterns and predictors of language development from 4 to 7 years in verbal children (IQ = 70) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 26-27). Children with typical language (TD; n = 858-861) and language impairment (LI; n = 119) were used for comparison. Children with ASD and LI had…

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

In this study, 5-year-olds and adults described scenes that differed according to whether (a) the subject or object of a transitive verb represented an accessible or inaccessible referent, consistent or inconsistent with patterns of preferred argument structure, and (b) a simple noun was sufficient to uniquely identify an inaccessible referent.…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of…

The present study investigates flexibility of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development, and its relationship with patterns attested in the input. The data is taken from a case study of a monolingual English-speaking boy aged 2; 5-2; 9 and his mother while engaged in daily activities in the home. Data were coded according to…

This paper argues for broader consideration of children's language production systems and, in that context, describes research on children's planning of syntactic structures. The research presented here measures non-fluency patterns in elicited utterances of varied syntactic type. We describe and interpret several regularities in these patterns…

The structure of /s/-initial clusters is debated in developmental phonology. Pan and Snyder (2004) took the Government Phonology (GP) framework and proposed that production of /s/-initial clusters requires the positive setting of two binary parameters [+/-Branching rhyme (BR)] and [+/-Magic empty nucleus (MEN)] and the initial /s/ is treated as a…

Some peculiar properties of children's passives have long been observed in various languages such as an asymmetry between actional passives and nonactional passives. These peculiarities have been accounted for under the hypothesis that children's early passives are adjectival, and as such exhibit properties of adjectival passives in adult grammar.…

In this case study, all parental talk directed to a young child with autism at home over a 3-day period was analyzed for internal state (IS) language, which explicitly focuses upon the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of animate beings. The mother and father used IS terms in 33% and 24% of their utterances, respectively, with sensory and desire…

Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like "John was building a house" does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective…