"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…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

The induction problems facing language learners have played a central role in debates about the types of learning biases that exist in the human brain. Many linguists have argued that some of the learning biases necessary to solve these language induction problems must be both innate and language-specific (i.e., the Universal Grammar (UG)…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

The early development of vocalic and consonantal production in Mandarin-learning infants was studied at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations were recorded for 24 infants grouped by age: G1 (0 ; 7 to 1 ; 0) and G2 (1 ; 1 to 1 ; 6). Additionally, the infant-directed speech of 24 caregivers was recorded…

Describes a study that examined phonological features of a group of 10 Urdu speaking children (20 to 30 months) to determine if a general theory of language learning can be deduced on the basis of Jakobson's theory of language universals. Addresses the question of how far such a theory is applicable to Urdu speaking children acquiring their native…

This paper discusses empirical findings from the first language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese suggesting that certain properties of the logical form of natural language are not learned from experience. These unlearnable properties appear to manifest themselves in the child's linguistic knowledge as soon as prerequisite conditions are met.…

Discusses the strategies that a child might employ during the one-word stage in constructing an early lexicon. An attempt is made to shed light on some strategies by analyzing the lexical and phonological development of two children who seem to take opposite approaches. (Author/JL)

Three experiments were conducted to conceptualize how structural differences between English and Japanese affect the way in which young children acquire the verification system. Linguistic characteristics that may distinguish between English and Japanese verifications are described along with the possible responses to four types of statement: true…

This paper reports on the acquisition of the voicing contrast in Mexican-Spanish word-initial stops. In Study 1, three Spanish-speaking monolingual children were recorded every two weeks for seven months, beginning when the children were about 1;7. In Study 2, four monolingual children about 3;10 were recorded once or twice. Two analyses were…

Children's productions of words with stop-liquid clusters in the adult model are compared across six languages. Although the children learning these languages need not follow the same course of learning, processes operative on adult clusters are shown to be very similar. The children's productions all progressed through the same three major…

The present research investigated whether children's referential choices for verb arguments are motivated by pragmatic features of discourse referents across different developmental stages, not only for children learning null argument languages but also for those learning overt argument languages. In Study 1, the form (null, pronominal, or…

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)