The well-known sampling limitation of most longitudinal corpus data can be even more consequential in the study of morphosyntactic variation in child language. An analysis of caregiver input suggests that variable use in overlapping contexts may be hard to find by solely relying on corpus data collected under the sampling procedures that are…

We investigated the effect of part of speech adoption on the utterance length of Mandarin-speaking children. A total of 209 typically developing Taiwanese children aged 3-6 years participated in the study. They included 90 boys and 119 girls recruited from preschools in Miaoli City, New Taipei City, and Taipei City. We collected children's…

Examining the dimensionality of oral discourse language skills in early childhood is crucial in informing theories of language and literacy development. This study examined the factor structure of linguistic and discourse features in oral text production for second graders. A total of 330 English-speaking second graders (M[subscript age] = 7.33,…

Examining the dimensionality of oral discourse language skills in early childhood is crucial in informing theories of language and literacy development. This study examined the factor structure of linguistic and discourse features in oral text production for second graders. A total of 330 English-speaking second graders (M[subscript age]= 7.33,…

The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers "all," "every," and "each" in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

This article explores the role of the reportative BIN in Yucatec Maya language acquisition and socialization among children aged 4 years and above, focusing on their interactions during pretend play. Building upon prior research on caregivers' strategic use of BIN, the study aims to elucidate the nuanced meanings and functions of the reportative…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…