Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

In teacher training curricula, books are presented as an ideal material for building and enriching young children's language. Yet, the routine of reading at home with children is hardly ever mentioned. In this chapter, the author proposes analyses of story-reading activities from a usage-based and first language acquisition perspective. The goal…

Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database…

The phonetic characteristics of canonical babbling produced by Korean- and English-learning infants were compared with consonant and vowel frequencies observed in infant-directed speech produced by Korean- and English-speaking mothers. For infant output, babbling samples from six Korean-learning infants were compared with an existing English…

This paper discusses different approaches to language acquisition in relation to children's acquisition of word order in "wh"-questions in English and Norwegian. While generative models assert that children set major word order parameters and thus acquire a rule of subject-auxiliary inversion or generalized verb second (V2) at an early stage, some…

Theories of indefinites vary with respect to whether these noun phrases can be treated as quantificational. Although everyone seems to be in agreement that indefinites do not always introduce their own quantificational force, there is widespread disagreement as to whether they ever do. In this article, we present experimental evidence from…

Investigates the use of clauses expressing relational processes by young children interacting in a free play situation and using English as a second language. Concludes that the use of language to explore and express relations in the environment is an important aspect of child-child interaction. (MES)

Argues that an important type of child knowledge about letters is knowledge of the phonological structure of the letters' names in English. Concludes that learning the alphabet forms the basis for generalizations about the structure of letter names. (22 references) (Author/CK)

Focuses on nativist theories of language learning and how they apply to second-language acquisition (SLA). The article is seeking a nativism that goes beyond the scope of Universal Grammar and explains the human cognitive capacity for language learning, the learning of all language structures found in natural languages, and SLA. (95 references)…

To raise a child bilingually, parents may need assistance with increased second language input from outside the home. One way to do this is through the use of mother tongue playgroups for young children. (SL)

Describes the language development of two children, now aged 5 and 8, who acquired two languages--Spanish and German--simultaneously from birth and a third--English--when very young. Focuses on the following factors: patterns of interference, code switching, language dominance, the role of parents, the social environment, and the child's…

The form of Japanese children's personal narratives is distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience. Conversations between…

Describes a mispronunciation detection task, in which listeners' sensitivity to deviations in speech is measured by their pressing a button upon hearing a mispronounced word in lists or sentences. Notes that reaction times and miss rates indicate the effects of position of a misplaced phoneme in a word, the size of the phonemic deviation, lexical…

Presents the findings of an ethnolinguistic study conducted in northeastern England on children's language behavior during their first term in school. The article combines two theoretical perspectives in an analytical description of this behavior presented in three levels of data analysis. (23 references) (Author/CK)