Purpose: This study investigates the acquisition of aspect markers by Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to typically developing aged-matched (TDA) children and typically developing younger (TDY) children through the aspect hypothesis (AH). Method: A sentence-picture matching task and a priming…

We investigated toddlers' understanding of the hierarchical syntactic configurations that constrain the referential meanings of reflexives and pronouns. In particular, reflexives must co-refer with the c-commanding antecedent within the local domain (Principle A) (e.g., He[subscript i] washes himself[subscript i]. John[subscript i] knows that…

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…

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…

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…

This article focuses on complex predicates in Qaqet, a Papuan (Baining) language of Papua New Guinea, spoken by 15,000 people and still being acquired monolingually in remote areas. A large part of the Qaqet verb lexicon is compositional, consisting of simple verb roots that combine with prepositions or particles/suffixes, jointly contributing to…

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…

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…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two…

Acquisition of an argument structure may be affected by the diversity of lexical types that appear in that structure (Conwell et al., 2011; Yang, 2016). Seventy-two 5- and 6-year-old English-speaking children completed a learning study where they were exposed to a novel argument structure and then tested on their ability to comprehend it. 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…

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…

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical…

How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper…