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Yuan Xie; Peng Zhou – First Language, 2024
Associative anaphora refers to a discourse operation that links a definite determiner phrase (DP) to an antecedent that acts as an indirect referent of the definite DP. For example, in the sequence 'I bought a laptop. The keyboard was black', the definite DP 'the keyboard' is linked to 'a laptop', meaning 'the keyboard of the laptop'. The…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Preschool Children, Semantics, Child Development
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Xiangjun Deng; Xiaobei Zheng; Haoyan Ge – First Language, 2024
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…
Descriptors: Child Language, Form Classes (Languages), Grammar, Children
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Clifton Pye – First Language, 2024
The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…
Descriptors: Intonation, Suprasegmentals, American Indian Languages, Vowels
Morton, Ian; Schuele, C. Melanie – First Language, 2021
Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…
Descriptors: Phrase Structure, Preschool Children, Semantics, Syntax
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Dye, Cristina; Kedar, Yarden; Lust, Barbara – First Language, 2019
Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…
Descriptors: Child Language, Nouns, Verbs, Form Classes (Languages)
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Ninio, Anat – First Language, 2018
Many sentences of adult English are analytic constructions, namely clauses with a matrix verb complemented by a dependent predicate that does not have an expressed syntactic subject. Examples are subject and object control, raising to subject or object, periphrastic tense, aspect and modality, copular predication and "do"-support. In…
Descriptors: Semantics, Language Acquisition, English, Phrase Structure
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Hao, Ying; Bedore, Lisa; Sheng, Li; Zhou, Peng; Zheng, Li – First Language, 2021
Mandarin classifiers are a complex system, but little is known about how Mandarin-speaking children manage to learn the system. Based on the extant literature, we explored potential factors influencing the comprehension and production of Mandarin shape classifiers, including classifier-based semantic categorization and errors pertaining to the…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Child Language
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Pérez-Hernández, Lorena; Duvignau, Karine – First Language, 2016
The present study looks into the largely unexplored territory of the cognitive underpinnings of semantic approximations in child language. The analysis of a corpus of 233 semantic approximations produced by 101 monolingual French-speaking children from 1;8 to 4;2 years of age leads to a classification of a significant number of them as instances…
Descriptors: French, Monolingualism, Child Language, Figurative Language
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Schults, Astra; Tulviste, Tiia – First Language, 2016
The growth rate and the composition of expressive lexicon was studied in a sample of 903 infants between the age of 0;8 and 1;4 whose parents completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory-Words and Gestures. As expected, older children had on average larger vocabularies compared to younger children.…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Infants, Expressive Language, Child Language