In our recent paper, "Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax" ("Journal of Child Language" 31, 61-99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high…

Theories of indefinites vary with respect to whether these noun phrases can be treated as quantificational. Although everyone seems to be in agreement that indefinites do not always introduce their own quantificational force, there is widespread disagreement as to whether they ever do. In this article, we present experimental evidence from…

Most children between 18 and 24 months can say about 50 words and understand hundreds more. While children a few months younger use single words to label objects and people, the one- and two-word phrases children use at this age show the beginnings of what they call "stories"--children's expressions of their desires, descriptions of what they see,…

Bilingualism is often considered an inappropriate developmental choice for children with specific language impairment (SLI) because, according to a widespread belief, these children's limited capacity for language would be overtaxed by learning two linguistic systems. However, there has not been adequate empirical investigation of SLI in bilingual…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

This study examines infants' joint attention behavior and language development in a rural village in Nigeria. Participants included eight younger (1;0 to 1;5, M age=1;2) and eight older toddlers (1;7 to 2;7, M age=2;1). Joint attention behaviors in social interaction contexts were recorded and coded at two time points six months apart. Analyses…

The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. "no sleep", "not see", "can't reach") from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3-3;4 (MLU 2.05-3.1) and his mother. The…

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension…

This study examines the mental processes involved in children's on-line recognition of inflected word forms using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixty children in three age groups (20 six- to seven-year-olds, 20 eight- to nine-year-olds, 20 eleven- to twelve-year-olds) and 23 adults (tested in a previous study) listened to sentences containing…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

Orphanage life places children at risk of developmental delay, particularly with regard to speech and language acquisition. The aim of this study was to evaluate opportunities for children in an orphanage in South Africa to acquire communicative competence, by examining adult-child and child-child interactions and by evaluating the structure and…

An overview of the babbling stage in child language acquisition, which occurs normally at age six months to one year, looks at research on this period. The babbling stage is preceded by arbitrary infant vocalization and is succeeded by production of simple but recognizable words. Babbling represents a period of increasing pattern and articulatory…

This study examined word meanings in the single word period of language learning. Ten children were seen for 5 hours each month from the time they started learning language until their median length of utterance was 2.5 words. All the children's utterances, and the extralinguistic contexts of the utterances, such as objects and movements, were…

Results of two experiments support these hypotheses: 1) children tend to treat contradictions and tautologies as empirical statements, due to their nonempirical character, not merely to the logical words occurring in them; and 2) the ability to examine language objectively is necessary for the ability to correctly evaluate nonempirical statements.…

A non-English portion of the universal initial-cluster hierarchy is cognitively represented in English-speaking monolingual children and adolescents. Subjects in an experiment were asked to select frequency of non-English consonant clusters, and they were able to reconstruct the phonological hierarchy. (CK)