Previous research has examined children's ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1 ; 9 to 2 ; 10 (N=34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In, children added "-ed" and "-ing" to novel stems, and dropped them from novel…

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by…

Studies examining factors that influence when words are learned typically investigate one lexical category or a small set of words. We provide the first evaluation of the relation between input frequency and age of acquisition for a large sample of words. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory provides norming data on age of…

This article is concerned with the proper characterization of subject omission at a particular stage in German child language. It focuses on post-verbal null subjects in finite clauses, here termed Rogues. It is argued that the statistically significant presence of Rogues, in conjunction with their distinct developmental profile, speaks against a…

Speech and language difficulties can be indicative of other cognitive, social and developmental problems. Tools used in the UK have not (1) targeted two-year-old children, (2) included both parents' reports and independent observations, and (3) simultaneously evaluated expression, understanding and speech. This cross-sectional study of two…

The belief that a child has to abandon his home language to learn English implies that the young brain has limited learning capacity. Early childhood teachers need to help families understand that children can learn two languages at the same time. What matters is that the infant/toddler is in an effective language-learning environment, whether it…

This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle "auch" "also" by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle "auch" by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented "auch" compared to the accented one. But in…

Much research on requests has been carried out among L1 Chinese adults, L1 Chinese children, L1 children, L2 adults, and L2 children, but no studies to date have simultaneously examined Chinese children's requests in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). The aim of this study is to investigate how Taiwanese elementary school children vary requests…

The purpose of this study was to determine the natural order of acquisition of the proform "it," comparing deictic pronoun "it," anaphoric pronoun "it" and expletive "it." Files from four children (Adam, Eve, Nina and Peter) aged 1 ; 6-3 ; 0 in the CHILDES database were coded for occurrences of NP it (here it is) and expletive it (it's raining).…

How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme.…

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously…

The main objective of this paper is to describe the trajectory of Danish children's early lexical development relative to other languages, by comparing a Danish study based on the Danish adaptation of "The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories" (CDI) to 17 comparable CDI-studies. The second objective is to address the feasibility…

This paper presents a large-scale cross-sectional study of Danish children's early language acquisition based on the Danish adaptation of the "MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories" (CDI). Measures of validity and reliability imply that the Danish adaptation of the American CDI has been adjusted linguistically and culturally in…

Purpose: Using a sample of culturally/linguistically diverse children, we present data to illustrate the value of empirically derived combinations of tools and cutoffs for determining eligibility in child language impairment. Method: Data were from 95 4- and 6-year-olds (40 African American, 55 White; 18 with language impairment, 77 without) who…

Although sharing many of the identified difficulties associated with autism, Asperger's syndrome (AS) is widely believed to differ in the domain of linguistic deficit. While researchers may disagree in detail about the language and communication performance of pupils with Asperger's syndrome, there seems to be general consensus that such…