This paper presents an experimental study of the rarely explored question of how input through instruction interacts with L2 acquisition at the level of modular linguistic knowledge. The investigation focuses on L2 knowledge of the English polarity item "any," whose properties are only partially covered by typical language-teaching…

Purpose: To extend formal models of language learnability to applications in clinical treatment of children with functional phonological delays. Method: The focus of the narrative review is on phonological complexity. This follows from learnability theory, whereby complexity in the linguistic input to children has been shown to trigger language…

The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the view that the language a person speaks influences his perception of the world. This hypothesis is frequently misunderstood to be a question of the influence of language on culture, when in reality it emphasizes the influence of language on the cognition of its speakers. This distinction between culture…

Cross-sectional and longitudinal acquisition data for English, German, Italian, and Turkish children ranging in age from approximately 1 to 4 provide a preliminary answer to the question of whether there is a consistent interlanguage order of development of notions of conjunction. It was found that children first conjoin sentences by simple…

Every speech community has a baby talk register (BT) of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features regarded as primarily appropriate for addressing young children and also for other displaced or extended uses. Much BT is analyzable as derived from normal adult speech (AS) by such simplifying processes as reduction, substitution, assimilation,…

A study was conducted in 1972-73 in Berkeley, Rome, Dubrovnik, and Istanbul, in order to examine the differences and similarities in the sequence of the development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. The subjects consisted of 48 two-, three-, and four-year-olds in each field site. Groups of three girls and…

This analysis of Brazilian baby talk (BT) includes data from two sources: elicitations of the use of BT from three mothers, all of whom have university degrees, and observations of adult-child interactions in the home. The data shows Ferguson's modified list of thirty lexical items that frequently have BT forms in various languages and the…