The early development of vocalic and consonantal production in Mandarin-learning infants was studied at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations were recorded for 24 infants grouped by age: G1 (0 ; 7 to 1 ; 0) and G2 (1 ; 1 to 1 ; 6). Additionally, the infant-directed speech of 24 caregivers was recorded…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Contexts of limited input such as trilingual families where a language is not spoken in the wider community but only by a reduced number of speakers in the home provide a unique opportunity to examine closely the relationship between a child's input and what she learns to say. Barnes reported on the relationship between maternal input and a…

The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children,…

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong…

The study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9-3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns--the number of syllables and stress patterns--is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and…

Early prosodic development (f[subscript 0] variation) was systematically measured in Mandarin-learning infants at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations of twenty-four infants aged 0;7 to 1;6 were recorded in 45-minute sessions. The speech production of twenty-four caregivers was also audio-recorded during…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously…

Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are…

In this squib we examine the time course of children's acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kayne's (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional…

The author argues that a child is linguistically sophisticated by the time he starts school and that his language should be respected even if it does not fit the correct" pattern of the school. (MM)