The purpose of the current study was to revisit a controversial topic: whether frequencies of phonological consonant and vowel classes differ in speech directed to children and to adults. In addition, the current study investigated whether the frequency of phonological consonant and vowel classes changes with children's increasing chronological…

As written language contains more complex syntax than spoken language, exposure to written language provides opportunities for children to experience language input different from everyday speech. We investigated the distribution and nature of relative clauses in three large developmental corpora: one of child-directed speech (targeted at…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

Debate around inflectional morphology in language acquisition has contrasted various rule- versus analogy-based approaches. This paper tests the rule-based Tolerance Principle (TP) against a new type of pattern in the acquisition of the possessive suffix -im in Northern East Cree. When possessed, each noun type either requires or disallows the…

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

The present study examines the development of the earliest type of complex predicates to emerge in child Hebrew -- extended predicate constructions. These constructions take the form of a modal/aspectual operator followed by an infinitival verb form (e.g., "roce lesaxek" 'want to.play'), and since they serve various discursive functions…

Using a cross-linguistic approach, we investigated Turkish-speaking children's acquisition and use of relative clauses (RCs) by examining longitudinal child-caregiver interactions and cross-sectional peer conversations. Longitudinal data were collected from 8 children between the ages of 8 and 36 months. Peer conversational corpus came from 78…

This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

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…

The present study investigated children's early use of verb inflection in Japanese by comparing a generativist account, which predicts that the past tense will have a special default-like status for the child during the early stages, with a constructivist input-driven account, which assumes that children's acquisition and use of inflectional forms…

We tested four predictions based on the assumption that optional infinitives can be attributed to properties of the input whereby children inappropriately extract non-finite subject-verb sequences (e.g. "the girl run") from larger input utterances (e.g. "Does the girl run?" "Let's watch the girl run"). Thirty children…

The process of the language acquisition of children is reflected in two aspects; language structure and pragmatic functions. Data from "The Longtime Tracing Oral Corpus of Typical Development Children" (one child; 2,367 sentences) are analyzed. This study examines the child's sentence final particle (SFP) "ba", in which we…

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…

Because of its structural characteristics, specifically the prevalence of verb types in infant-directed speech and frequent pronoun-dropping, the Italian language offers an attractive opportunity to investigate the predictive effects of input frequency and positional salience on children's acquisition of nouns and verbs. We examined this…