Usage-based theories of children's syntactic acquisition (e.g., Tomasello, 2000a) predict that children's abstract lexical categories emerge from their experience with particular words in constructions in their input. Because modifiers in English are almost always prenominal, children might initially treat adjectives similarly to nouns when used…

Introduction: It is well documented that preschoolers with DLD produce first instances of sentential complement clause sentences later than same-age peers with typical language. However, it remains unknown whether children with DLD are limited in their production of a variety of sentential complement clause sentences. Aims: Using a sentence…

Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some -- like "red," "round," "rough," or "rectangular" -- map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others -- like "ready," "reasonable," or "required" -- express abstract…

Purpose: Our study analyzes probabilistic constraints on subject expression previously found in adult Spanish in the speech of typically developing (TD) Spanish-speaking children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Previous work shows that children with DLD produce fewer overt subjects than typically developing children, and…

The well-known sampling limitation of most longitudinal corpus data can be even more consequential in the study of morphosyntactic variation in child language. An analysis of caregiver input suggests that variable use in overlapping contexts may be hard to find by solely relying on corpus data collected under the sampling procedures that are…

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…

Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows…

"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…

This dissertation interrogates the representation of syntactic locality constraints, specifically intervention locality, within child grammar. Our focal point is the Intervention Hypothesis, which suggests that children are governed by a strict version of featural Relativized Minimality, leading to comprehension difficulties when partial featural…

The aim of the present research is to investigate the development of left and right dislocation in child French through a corpus study of three children until age 2;7 from the corpus of Lyon (Demuth & Tremblay, 2008). We extracted a total of 704 dislocations and analysed their syntactic properties. We show that (i) right dislocations are more…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

Introduction: The present study investigated English-speaking 5-9 year olds' (n = 600, normative sample) comprehension of relative, adverbial and complement clauses using the Test of Complex Syntax-Electronic (TECS-E), an online interactive assessment. with strong test-retest reliability, concurrent validity and internal consistency. Method: Using…

Interface Delay is a theory of syntactic development, which attempts to explain an array of constructions that are slow to develop, which are characterized by being sensitive to discourse-pragmatic considerations of the type associated with the natural semantic class of definites. The theory claims that neither syntax itself, nor the…

This study addresses the question of whether gender agreement is impaired in SLI German. Article production and gender marking on articles were examined in three groups of German-speaking children: 10 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), 10 age-matched typically developing (TD) children, and 10 TD children who were on average two…