Relative clauses (RCs) are complex syntactic structures because they consist of multiple clauses and involve syntactic movement. RCs are known as a reliable clinical marker of syntactic impairment across many different languages and populations. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with the comprehension and production of RCs,…

The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n =…

Purpose: We examined indices of narrative microstructure as metrics of language development and impairment in Arabic-speaking children. We examined their age sensitivity, correlations with standardized measures, and ability to differentiate children with average language and language impairment. Method: We collected story narratives from 177…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed…

This study examined the comprehension of actional and psychological verbs in both their active and passive (short and long) forms by 99 Serbian-speaking children. The children, whose age ranged between 3 years, 6 months (3;6) and 7 years, 6 months (7;6), were divided into three groups: 3;6-5 ("M" = 4.3), 5;1-6;1 ("M" = 5.6),…

When natural language input contains grammatical forms that are used probabilistically and inconsistently, learners will sometimes reproduce the inconsistencies; but sometimes they will instead regularize the use of these forms, introducing consistency in the language that was not present in the input. In this paper we ask what produces such…

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the…

Productive errors in the Spanish of 3 Spanish-speaking children and 115 adults learning Spanish as a second language are analyzed. The errors are organized into three categories--lexical, morphological, and syntactic--and each category is further divided according to the type of cognitive error-processing strategy shown: simplification, reduction…

Some results of seven studies of children's native Finnish language acquisition from 1971-1980 are summarized, focusing on two aspects: the main features in the development of Finnish inflection forms in 2-7-year-old children, and selected information derived from children's errors at the various age levels. Subjects were 260 children attending…

English-speaking and Dutch-speaking children were asked to pick the big, tall, or long members of pairs of bricks. Comprehension improved with age but older children in both groups were prone to choose the taller (but smaller) of two objects when asked to point to the bigger one. (SED)

Reports an experimental investigation of the influence of linguistic factors on linguistic performance. The factors studied were interpretive complexity and surface length. Results show an interaction between types of linguistic complexity and type of linguistic performance. (Author/SED)