Studies that measure the effectiveness of language-training program for children's language development do not clearly identify in adult-child interaction which characteristics of educators' language are most effective, particularly for children over 4 years of age who need to develop complex syntactic skills. Our study aimed to analyze the…

Two studies were conducted with Cantonese-speaking preschoolers examining J. de Villiers's (1995) hypothesis that syntactic complements play a unique role in the acquisition of false belief (FB). In Study 1, the authors found a positive correlation between FB and syntactic complements in 72 four- to six-year-old Cantonese-speaking preschoolers.…

The purpose of this research was to show how the syntactic and semantic components of the tense-aspect system interact during the acquisition process. Our methodology involved: (1) identifying predicates, (2) finding the initial occurrence of their tense-aspect morphology, and (3) observing the emergence of contrasts. Six children learning Polish…

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, Tomasello (2000) suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of…

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency…