This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive…

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un[subscript MASC]ravole "a ravole"). Test trials…

In order for schools to develop systematic and realistic strategies for extending children's linguistic repertoires, it is imperative that teachers and allied professionals have access to scientifically informed accounts of the variable but structured nature of the everyday speech used by children. Because there is insufficient information…

It was hypothesized that children may experience more difficulty in interpreting "after" than "before" because the sentence typically used in comprehension tasks facilitates dependence on sentence-processing strategies effective with "before" sentences but only partially effective with "after" sentences. For…

Results of a study of the differences between standard French and Acadian French as spoken by Nova Scotian children are presented. The study had as subjects 24 school children, two each from first, second, and third grades from each of four geographic regions. The language corpus consisted of elicited descriptions of pictures and spontaneous…

This study examines the incidence and character of conditional statements ("if...then") in the spontaneous speech of young children. Twenty-four pairs of siblings, ranging in age from 2.1 years to 7.3 years, were observed and recorded while interacting in their homes for a period of 1 hour. Sixty-nine statements including "if"…

Thirty-five papers, all but one in French, presented at the conference on research in linguistics are presented here. Topics include: verb tenses in English; computerized text analysis program; study of specialized terminology; court translation in Canada; subject-verb agreement in English; bilingual editing; swearing with religious words;…