Cross-linguistic research has shown that object which-questions are the hardest types of wh-questions for children to comprehend and are acquired late. The present study asks when Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM), an early cue to object marking, is actively used to successfully comprehend object which-questions in Spanish-speaking…

Research suggests that girls acquire language faster than boys, with gender differences most pronounced in vocabulary acquisition during early childhood. This study examines the role of gender in the acquisition of vocabulary and morphosyntax in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children aged 18 to 36 months. Using the Palestinian Arabic Communicative…

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…

Children's speech is influenced by the speech they hear, in particular by the parental speech addressed directly to them. The aim of this study was to analyse toddlers' speech with their parents and to investigate the influence of specific characteristics of child-directed speech on child speech in real time during mother-child and father-child…

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they…

For children, Object Relative (OR) clauses can be late acquired across a number of languages (e.g., this is the goat that the cows are pushing), and production of non-standard ORs that include resumption is often attested (e.g., Italian; French; English). In addition, starting at age 6, children start adopting passive subject relatives (SRs)…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

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 present study investigated the role of morphosyntactic information in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verb argument structures (VAS) in the Japanese language, which allows massive omissions of arguments and case markers. In particular, we investigated how the 'variation sets' proposed by Küntay and Slobin work in Japanese.…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children's narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax,…

Few studies provide information on the reliability and validity of parental report instruments when assessing the language skills of pre-school-aged children. This study investigates the internal consistency and concurrent validity of the parental report instrument, the Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory III (FinCDI III),…

Polish and English differ in the surface realization of the underlying Determiner Phrase (DP): Polish lacks an article system, whereas English makes use of articles for both grammatical and pragmatic reasons. This difference has an impact on how referentiality is rendered in both languages. In this article, the authors investigate the use of…

Closely related Swedish and German both mark information status of referents morphologically, though little is known about its acquisition. This study investigates character introductions in the narratives of 4- and 6-year-old Swedish-German bilinguals (N = 40) in both languages, elicited with MAIN "Cat/Dog." We analyse effects of age…

We investigate the development of text reconstruction abilities in Hebrew-speaking children, with a particular focus on verbal passive constructions. The acquisition of verbal passives in Hebrew is a late developmental milestone, closely tied to the expression of event semantics. The current study explores how narrative and informative text genres…