Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

Argues that current attempts to show that forward directionality effects can also be induced in Japanese acquisition do not succeed in supporting the forward directionality preference of anaphora. (57 references) (Author/CB)

Three experiments were conducted to conceptualize how structural differences between English and Japanese affect the way in which young children acquire the verification system. Linguistic characteristics that may distinguish between English and Japanese verifications are described along with the possible responses to four types of statement: true…

Compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in American and British English, French, German, Japanese, and Italian. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure mean fundamental frequency, variability, utterance, duration, and pause duration. (67 references) (Author/CB)

The present research investigated whether children's referential choices for verb arguments are motivated by pragmatic features of discourse referents across different developmental stages, not only for children learning null argument languages but also for those learning overt argument languages. In Study 1, the form (null, pronominal, or…

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…

Investigation of use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language found that sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Most omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of "mixed"…

This volume contains working papers on a variety of topics in linguistics. They include: "A View of Phonology from a Cognitive and Functional Perspective" (Joan Bybee); "The Geography of Language Shift: Distance from the Mexican Border and Spanish Language Claiming in the Southwestern United States" (Garland D. Bills, Eduardo…

The purpose of this paper is to review recent Soviet research on the child's development of Russian grammar, with detailed information on valuable methods for investigating this process. Cross-linguistic comparisons are made where applicable in view of their relevance for the study of universal aspects of language acquisition and linguistic…

The parameter-setting model of universal grammar provides a basis for integrating two theories of second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and creative construction. The elicited responses of adult native speakers of Spanish and adult native speakers of Japanese were examined. The head-initial/head-final parameter was the principle…