In error analyses using sentence repetition data, most authors focus on word types of omissions. The current study considers serial order in omission patterns independent of functional categories. Data was collected from Russian and German sentence repetition tasks performed by 53 five-year-old bilingual children. Number and positions of word…

This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system,…

This study investigates the coordination of matrix and subordinate clauses within finite complement-clause constructions. The data come from diary and audio recordings which include the utterances produced by an American English-speaking child, L, between the ages 1;08 and 3;05. We extracted all the finite complement-clause constructions that L…

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by…

This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech ("Elephant said that he gets the football"), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we…

Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm…

This study examined the production of three types of noun plural inflections, feminine sound plural (FSP), masculine sound plural (MSP), and broken plural (BP) in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without language impairment. A total of thirty-six Kuwaiti participants-twelve adults, twelve children with specific language impairment (SLI),…

We studied spontaneous speech noun-phrase production in eight French-speaking children with SLI (aged 5;0 to 5; 1) and controls matched on age (4;10 to 5;11) or MLU (aged 3;2 to 4;1). Results showed that children with SLI prefer simple DP structures to complex ones while producing more substitution and omission errors than controls. The three…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

The acquisition of German participle inflection was investigated using spontaneous speech samples from six children between 1 ; 4 and 3 ; 8 and ten children between 1 ; 4 and 2 ; 10 recorded longitudinally at regular intervals. Child-directed speech was also analyzed. In adult and child speech weak participles were significantly more frequent than…

This paper sets out to show how facilitation between different clause structures operates over time in syntax acquisition. The phenomenon of facilitation within given structures has been widely documented, yet inter-structure facilitation has rarely been reported so far. Our findings are based on the naturalistic production corpora of six toddlers…

English-acquiring children frequently make pronoun case errors, while German-acquiring children rarely do. Nonetheless, German-acquiring children frequently make article case errors. It is proposed that when child-directed speech contains a high percentage of case-ambiguous forms, case errors are common in child language; when percentages are low,…

In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…

Examined whether there was negative evidence in adult reformulations of erroneous child utterances, and if so, whether children made use of that evidence. Findings show that adults reformulate erroneous utterances often enough for learning to occur. Children can detect differences between their own utterance and the adult reformulation and make…

Contradicts a previous assertion by C. Tanz that children commit substitution errors usually using objective pronoun forms for nominative ones. Examples from Dutch and German provide evidence that substitutions are made in both directions. (CHK)