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Relative Clause Production Abilities of Hebrew-Speaking Children with ASD
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Nufar Sukenik – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
Relative clauses (RCs) are complex syntactic structures because they consist of multiple clauses and involve syntactic movement. RCs are known as a reliable clinical marker of syntactic impairment across many different languages and populations. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with the comprehension and production of RCs,…
Descriptors: Hebrew, Task Analysis, Error Analysis (Language), Autism Spectrum Disorders
Acquisition of Russian Noun Case by Bilingual Children: Lexical Cues to Case Assignment in Real and Novel Words
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Anna Chrabaszcz; Nina Ladinskaya; Anastasiya Lopukhina – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n =…
Descriptors: Russian, Bilingualism, Pictorial Stimuli, Monolingualism
The Extragrammaticality of the Acquisition of Adjunct Control
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Gerard, Juliana – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
Previous research on 4-6-year-olds' interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like "John called Mary before running to the store." Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children's errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by…
Descriptors: Child Behavior, Grammar, Language Acquisition, Task Analysis
Applying "Given-before-New" Principle in L2 English Datives Development
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Xiaoyu Zhang; Sang-Gu Kang – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…
Descriptors: Verbs, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction
Cognitive Inhibition Explains Children's Production of Medial "Wh"-Phrases
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Liter, Adam; Grolla, Elaine; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…
Descriptors: Inhibition, Phrase Structure, Language Acquisition, Grammar
The Repetition of Relative Clauses in Mandarin Children with Developmental Language Disorder
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Wang, Haiyan; Yu, Haopeng – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…
Descriptors: Language Impairments, Phrase Structure, Mandarin Chinese, Language Acquisition
Japanese Children's Knowledge of the Locality of "Zibun" and "Kare"
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Orita, Naho; Ono, Hajime; Feldman, Naomi H.; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
Although the Japanese reflexive "zibun" can be bound both locally and across clause boundaries, the third-person pronoun "kare" cannot take a local antecedent. These are properties that children need to learn about their language, but we show that the direct evidence of the binding possibilities of "zibun" is sparse…
Descriptors: Japanese, Form Classes (Languages), Language Acquisition, Speech Communication
Comparing Specific Language Impairment and Hearing Impairment: Different Profiles in German Verbal Agreement Morphology
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Penke, Martina; Rothweiler, Monika – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2018
The study aims at identifying characteristic phenotypes for children with SLI and children with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) in language and in domains associated with language. We focus on verbal agreement inflection and phonological short-term memory, phenomena that have been repeatedly found to be impaired in both groups of children. A…
Descriptors: Comparative Analysis, Language Impairments, Hearing Impairments, German
The Complexity of the Spanish Subjunctive in Bilingual Children with SLI
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Castilla-Earls, Anny; Pérez-Leroux, Ana Teresa; Restrepo, Maria Adelaida; Gaile, Daniel; Chen, Ziqiang – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2018
This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…
Descriptors: Spanish, Bilingualism, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning
In Search of L1 Evidence for Diachronic Reanalysis: Mapping Modal Verbs
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Cournane, Ailís – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2014
The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child…
Descriptors: Native Language, Verbs, Preferences, Task Analysis
A Large-Scale Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Acquisition of Passive
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Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Haman, Ewa; de López, Kristine Jensen; Smoczynska, Magdalena; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Szczerbinski, Marcin; van Hout, Angeliek; Dabašinskiene, Ineta; Gavarró, Anna; Hobbs, Erin; Kamandulyte-Merfeldiene, Laura; Katsos, Napoleon; Kunnari, Sari; Nitsiou, Chrisa; Olsen, Lone Sundahl; Parramon, Xavier; Sauerland, Uli; Torn-Leesik, Reeli; van der Lely, Heather – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
This cross-linguistic study evaluates children's understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and…
Descriptors: Language Research, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Language Acquisition
Omissions and Substitutions in Spanish Object Clitics: Developmental Optionality as a Property of the Representational System
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Castilla, Anny P.; Perez-Leroux, Ana T. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2010
This study examined the existence of an object omission stage and the interaction between object omissions and substitution errors in the early stages of the development of Spanish syntax. One hundred and three Spanish-speaking children from Colombia completed an elicitation task evaluating the production of direct object pronouns. Results…
Descriptors: Speech Communication, Syntax, Spanish Speaking, Spanish
Canonical and Epenthetic Plural Marking in Spanish-Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment
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Grinstead, John; Cantu-Sanchez, Myriam; Flores-Avalos, Blanca – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2008
In this study, we investigate whether specific language impairment (SLI) manifests itself grammatically in the same way in Spanish and English with respect to nominal plural marking. English-speaking children with SLI are very proficient at marking plural on nouns. Spanish has two main nominal plural allomorphs: /s/ and /es/. The /es/ allomorph…
Descriptors: Control Groups, Speech Communication, Nouns, Morphemes