This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., "that," "there") from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

The data for this study consisted of a longitudinal corpus of narratives from 17 English second language (L2) children, mean age of 5;4 years at the outset, with first languages (Lls) that do not have definite/indefinite articles (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and Lls that do have article systems (Spanish, Romanian and Arabic). We examined these…