"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what "or" means in ordinary statements of the form "A or B". Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". An alternative is to suppose that…

A child acquiring a language must learn to correctly match the phenomena of the realworld which he perceives with the lexical items and the segregates and perhaps some of the grammatical categories of the language to be learned. He must correlatively learn the organization in meaning of and among these last named elements, that is, the internal…

The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

Maintains that our understanding of language is enhanced by the study of pathology, rather than just the study of the normal. It is a sound complementary base to learn more about how language encodes more than labels. It encodes histories, personal myths, and affects and reflects aspects of deviance and delay in function. (SL)

The author considers controversial psycholinguistic problems in the study of first and second language acquisition, raising such questions as whether all children learn language in the same way, and whether all languages are learned in the same way. Her observations, based partially on observing her own bilingual child, suggest that the cenematic…

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to determine universals of grammatical development in children. On the basis of language acquisition data, a limited number of findings are presented in the form of suggested developmental universals. These universals are grouped according to the psychological variables which may determine them, in the…

Analysis showed that the majority of subjects applied a coherent strategy to three-word utterances presented in different word orders, and confirmed the existence of two primitive strategies. (Authors/CB)

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

The arguments for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as holophrases are reviewed. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the speech act as the basic unit of linguistic communication, rather than the sentence, is offered as a solution to the holophrase controversy. (Author/RM)

Longitudinal observation of one- to three-year-olds' (N=2) acquisition of complement phrasal construction in Korean found that, in spite of typological differences between English and Korean, both syntactic and semantic characteristics were shared by children acquiring complement structure in the two languages. (Author/CB)

Speech directed towards young children ("motherese") is subject to consistent systematic modifications. Recent research suggests that gesture directed towards young children is similarly modified (gesturese). It has been suggested that gesturese supports speech, therefore scaffolding communicative development (the facilitative…

Continued interest in second language acquisition as a reflection of first language acquisition may be due to increasing evidence of universals in child language acquisition. Some research has indicated that second language acquisition patterns do not match first language acquisition patterns. Rather than arguing that second language acquisition…

Some of the assertions made by Chomsky in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" are considered. In particular, the notion of a "competence" model in linguistics is criticized. Formal postulates for a conceptually-based linguistic theory are presented. (Author/JD)