This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and "wh"-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and…

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumental case--which could not be due to innate knowledge. Thirty Polish-speaking children aged 2; 6…

Challenges the position of Clark (1988) that no two forms in a language can mean the same thing. An alternative is offered that draws on the drive towards the adult system, development of nonlinguistic concepts, acquisition of language in context, and use of a cooperative principle in conversational exchanges. (64 references) (Author/CB)

Examines the age at which and the form in which children produce speech acts which commit them to a future action. Results revealed that all of the four- to 11-year-olds produced directive speech acts, but only the older children used the explicit performative verb "promise" to reassure the hearer of their commitment. (Author/CB)

Investigation of French mothers' (N=6) use of pronouns to refer to their infants during free play showed that third- and first-person pronouns occurred more often in the context of affect-oriented activities than in goal-directed activities. Second-person pronoun usage occurred more frequently in goal-directed activities. (Author/CB)

Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the…

Case studies are presented for two early talkers, one of whom represents a striking dissociation between vocabulary size and mean length of utterance. Each child is compared to controls in the same language stage, and the data are examined to determine whether the dissociation is best characterized as one between grammar and semantics, or a…

Word learning by young children is viewed as a problem deriving from the use of forms of discourse texts. Uses of causal and temporal terms in private speech by a child studied longitudinally from 1;9 to 3;0 are analyzed from this perspective. (Contains 38 references.) (JL)

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomolous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. (Author/CB)

Input language addressed to language-learning children was analyzed to assess the quality of the semantic-syntactic correspondence posited by the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis. This correspondence was strong--objects were labeled with nouns, actions with verbs, attributes with adjectives--and may serve to make children's construction of…

Examination of a two-year-old's early determiner-noun combinations suggested that early article use can be distributed across a variety of nouns, and that such usage does not seem appropriately characterized as a pattern of limited semantic scope. (CB)

Examines the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. (Author/VWL)