Tested the prediction that "yes-no" questions that place forms of the copula "be" in initial position will also increase the rate of growth of children's copula verb development. Data from 33 children who were matched for stage of language development at 1;9 and 2;0 confirm that the frequency of inverted copulas in yes-no…

Different interactions of two common phenomena--final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants--are examined with a focus on a case study of two young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. Argues that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects emerge in…

Examined use of word order and animacy for interpretation of sentences by typically-developing and language delayed children. Results indicate that typically-developing 2-year-olds use neither cue consistently to interpret sentences; typically-developing 2.5-year-olds used a coalition of word order and animacy cues; and language-delayed…

Investigated whether infants can construe the same set of objects as an object category or as embodying an object property. Results of 2 experiments involving 48 and 64 14-month-olds respectively suggest that infants have begun to distinguish nouns from adjectives, they expect different grammatical forms to highlight different aspects, and that…

Two experiments investigated why preschool children sometimes produce multiple words of a referent, but other times allow only on word. In the first experiment, 3- and 4-year-old children completed a naming task. Children produced on average more than two words per object. In the second, 3- and 4-year-olds learned new words for nameable objects.…

Discusses syntactic optionality, the coexistence within an individual grammar of two or more variants of a given construction that make use of the same lexical resources and express the same meaning. Focus is on syntactic optionality in second language grammars. (Author/VWL)

Examined input frequency, sentence position, and duration as contributing factors to grammatical inflections. In parents' conversations with and stories aimed at young children, noun plural inflections were more frequent than third singular verb inflections, especially in sentence-final position. Analysis of four mothers' speech when reading…

Investigated young children's learning of the correct use of first and second person pronouns, using feed-forward neural networks. The study involved four computer simulations using the cascade-correlation (CC) learning algorithm. Results indicated that the CC networks could produce the correct pronouns without errors if children heard pronouns…

Investigated young blind children's use of pronouns, following blind and sighted children longitudinally and analyzing every spatial deictic term and personal reference term they used (noting reversal errors). Results indicated that blind children began to use personal reference terms as early as sighted children, and use of reversals was not…

In a series of production and grammaticality judgment experiments, I investigated the status of children's non-adult questions with 2 auxiliary verbs, such as "What did the smurf didn't buy." Previous studies showed that these questions were produced primarily in negative contexts. In the first part of the study, I tested whether children produce…

We study the ability of children to provide an appropriate continuation for a stimulus sentence, taking into account the joint demands of situational aspect and grammatical aspect. We hypothesize that the aspectual transitions required by some aspectual combinations play a role in the difficulty of providing an appropriate continuation for them.…

In this squib we examine the time course of children's acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kayne's (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional…

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [-neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender…

Previous studies show that young monolingual children's ability to "fast map" new word forms is closely associated with both their age and existing vocabulary knowledge. In this study we investigate potential relationships between age, fast mapping skills and existing vocabulary knowledge in both languages of developing bilingual preschool…

The nature and origin of the human capacity for acquiring language is not yet fully understood. Here we uncover early roots of this capacity by demonstrating that humans are born with a preference for listening to speech. Human neonates adjusted their high amplitude sucking to preferentially listen to speech, compared with complex non-speech…