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Showing 1 to 15 of 77 results Save | Export
Liu, Minqi – ProQuest LLC, 2023
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…
Descriptors: Verbs, Mandarin Chinese, Form Classes (Languages), Syntax
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Aravind, Athulya; Koring, Loes – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
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…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Syntax
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Conwell, Erin; Auen, Amanda – Child Development, 2021
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…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Teaching Methods, Language Processing
Anongnard Nusartlert – ProQuest LLC, 2023
Minority languages in diglossic situations with a majority language face the danger of eventual loss of vitality. The first sign of this is when child language acquisition begins to erode. This dissertation investigates the intergenerational transmission of the Isan language, spoken in the Northeastern region of Thailand. While the Isan community…
Descriptors: Thai, Family Relationship, Language Maintenance, Mutual Intelligibility
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Dye, Cristina; Kedar, Yarden; Lust, Barbara – First Language, 2019
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…
Descriptors: Child Language, Nouns, Verbs, Form Classes (Languages)
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Nguyen, Emma; Pearl, Lisa – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal "be"-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as "wh"-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children's performance on these passives can be affected by the verb's lexical…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Value Judgment, Meta Analysis
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White, Michelle Jennifer; Southwood, Frenette; Huddlestone, Kate – First Language, 2023
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Language Acquisition, Indo European Languages, Standard Spoken Usage
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Pagliarini, Elena; Crain, Stephen; Guasti, Maria Teresa – Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2018
This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…
Descriptors: Italian, Psycholinguistics, Form Classes (Languages), Semantics
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Choe, Jinsun; O'Grady, William – Journal of Child Language, 2017
This paper investigates English-speaking children's acquisition of raising constructions (e.g. "John seems to Mary to be happy") and fnds an asymmetric effect of NP type on their comprehension: an improvement in performance is observed when a lexical NP is raised across a pronominal experiencer (e.g. "John seems to her to be…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar, English
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Fodor, Janet Dean – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
An evaluation measure (EM) guides a learner's choice of grammar when more than one is compatible with available input. EM must be universal, so children receiving comparable input acquire comparable grammars. It must favor the choices children actually make. The theoretical shift from rule-based grammars to principles-and-parameter-based grammars…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar
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Minai, Utako; Isobe, Miwa; Okabe, Reiko – Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2015
The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in "Descr Appl Linguist" 8:1-18, 1975; Sano in "Descr Appl Linguist" 10:213-233, 1977;…
Descriptors: Japanese, Child Language, Sentences, Psycholinguistics
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Contemori, Carla; Carlson, Matthew; Marinis, Theodoros – Journal of Child Language, 2018
Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and "wh"-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and…
Descriptors: Oral Language, Syntax, Ambiguity (Semantics), Eye Movements
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Conwell, Erin – Journal of Child Language, 2017
One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…
Descriptors: Nouns, Verbs, Suprasegmentals, Grammar
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Omaki, Akira; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2015
Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Linguistic Input
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Suzuki, Takaaki; Yoshinaga, Naoko – Journal of Child Language, 2013
The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not…
Descriptors: Japanese, Phrase Structure, Language Acquisition, Child Language
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