This cross-linguistic study investigates the relative importance of validity in terms of the strengths of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children (4; 6–6; 6). The notion of cue cost refers to the distinction between local and topological processing types. Choices of the agent (cue strength) and latencies (cue cost) were collected through the acting out of sentences containing different syntactic cues. These cues (word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement plus accusative preposition a in Spanish) are ordered on a continuum from the most topological (word order) to the most local (preposition a). The analysis of cue strengths reveals that, while for French children a linguistic cue is all the stronger the more topological it is (verbal agreement < clitic pronoun < word order), for Spanish children a cue is all the stronger the more local it is (word order < clitic pronoun < verbal agreement < preposition a). The fact that Spanish children's latencies are always shorter (2150 msec) than those of French children (3110 msec) must be related to the effect of the preposition a which permits efficient role assignments with minimal cost. These results stress the importance of locality in sentence processing. On the other hand, a comparison with our similar adult cross-linguistic data demonstrates that the impact of cue cost changes over time.

Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice picture-matching sentence comprehension task and a sentence repetition task. Thirty-three typically developing children completed both assessments, which included relative clauses representing a range of syntactic roles. Results revealed a similar order of difficulty of constructions on both measures but little agreement between them when evaluating individual differences. Interestingly, repetition was the easier of the two measures, with children showing the ability to repeat sentences they did not understand. This discrepancy is primarily attributed to the additional processing load resulting from the design of multiple-choice comprehension tasks, and highlights the fact that these assessments are invoking skills beyond those of linguistic competence.

A blind child and her sighted twin sister were recorded at home once a month from 2;5 to 3;5. Their imitations, repetitions and routines (IRR speech) were analysed with respect to three dimensions (type, faithfulness to the model, and function). MLU for IRR speech was greater than that for productive utterances, which supports the idea that these productions facilitate language development. The blind girl used routines and modified imitations and repetitions more frequently than her sighted sister, and her use of modified repetitions increased during the study. She also seemed to use IRR speech for a longer period in her development. Both children frequently used these forms as a means of maintaining conversation and to fulfil their intentions. By introducing modifications (varying some element, or expanding the model) both children, especially the blind girl, analysed language and learned to use these utterances in the appropriate circumstances with a clear pragmatic function. Such behaviour is typical of holistic language processing and acquisition.

Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, ‘real’ two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the acquisition of prosody, however, revealed that control of the phonetic parameters pitch, loudness, and duration is far from complete at such an early stage. In this study, we examine the interaction between the development of different types of syntactic structures and their prosodic organization. Data from a detailed production record of a monolingual German-learning boy is analysed both auditorily and acoustically with a focus on four different types of two-word utterances produced between 2;0 and 2;3. Two major findings are reported here. First, the different types of two-word utterances undergo individual trajectories of prosodic (re-)organization, in part depending on the time course in which they become productive. This suggests that different types of multiword utterances become prosodically fluent at different points in time. Second, the variability of prosodic features such as pauses and stress pattern is very high at the onset of combinatorial speech. Consequently, fluency or disfluency of individual examples should not be used as a reliable criterion for their syntactic status and we recommend caution when taking prosody as a cue for syntactic development.

The boundaries of many categories, and hence the boundaries between their names, are often vague (Lehrer 1970, Labov 1973). At the same time, the child who is just learning the denotation of a word often makes ‘mistakes’ and may over-extend words to include objects that do not belong to the adult category (e.g. Clark 1973). The present study is concerned with when children learn that boundaries are vague. It was hypothesized that children would first over-extend the use of terms such as cup and define the domain of denotation discretely on the basis of one or two perceptual factors, and only later would they learn that category boundaries are often vague because of the interdependence of physical and functional (i.e. cultural) properties. Children aged 3, 6, 9 and 12 years were asked to name and to sort twenty-five different drinking vessels; then they were asked for definitions of cup and glass and were also asked to choose the best exemplar present of each category. The results showed that children go through three stages. First, they over-extend the term cup. Next, they focus only on certain perceptual properties. Finally, they show growing awareness of functional properties and hence of the vagueness of the boundary between cups and glasses.

This study examined how four- to five-year-olds and seven- to eight-year-olds used intonation (accent placement and accent type) to encode topic and focus in Dutch. Naturally spoken declarative sentences with either sentence-initial topic and sentence-final focus or sentence-initial focus and sentence-final topic were elicited via a picture-matching game. Results showed that the four- to five-year-olds were adult-like in topic-marking, but were not yet fully adult-like in focus-marking, in particular, in the use of accent type in sentence-final focus (i.e. showing no preference for H*L). Between age five and seven, the use of accent type was further developed. In contrast to the four- to five-year-olds, the seven- to eight-year-olds showed a preference for H*L in sentence-final focus. Furthermore, they used accent type to distinguish sentence-initial focus from sentence-initial topic in addition to phonetic cues.

Twenty-four infants were tested monthly for the production of imperative and declarative gestures between 0 ; 9 and 1 ; 3 and concurrent mother–infant free-play sessions were conducted at 0 ; 9, 1 ; 0 and 1 ; 3 (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, 1998). Free-play transcripts were subsequently coded for maternal talk about mental states. Results revealed that the earlier infants produced imperative gestures, the more frequently their mothers made reference to the infants' own volitional states (want, try, need, etc.) at 1 ; 3. The same relation also emerged using maternal reports of their infants' gestural communication on a standard language development measure. These results indicate that mothers' talk about desires and intentions is linked to their infants' early developing communicative competence.

To examine the effects of direct intervention on language learning, 18 children ranging in age from 3;6 to 4;6 were systematically taught linguistic structures still beyond their developmental grasp. Four types of relative clause sentences were trained, using a toy manipulation task. Solid improvement was found in the performance of subjects in the two experimental conditions between the Pre- and Post-test Phases. No significant improvement was demonstrated by the control condition subjects. This successful outcome is viewed as demonstrating that the language learning process is somewhat independent of cognitive development. In addition, error response analyses indicated that the First Noun strategy accounted for the majority of errors, providing support for the canonical–sentoid hypothesis.

This study investigates when and how French-learning children acquire the main grammatical constraint on the noun category, i.e. the obligatory use of a preceding determiner. Spontaneous speech samples coming from the corpora of twenty children in each of three age groups, 1 ; 8, 2 ; 6, 3 ; 3, were transcribed and coded with respect to morphosyntactic, lexical and length properties of nouns. Results indicate that noun grammaticalization is a gradual process which involves early transitional procedures, as well as an increasing diversity in the content and contexts of determiner use. In support of prosodic hypotheses, noun length effects (in favor of monosyllabic nouns) mostly occurred at 1 ; 8. Animacy effects supporting the lexical hypothesis (in favor of inanimate nouns) occurred at 2 ; 6 and 3 ; 3. We suggest that noun grammaticalization is influenced by both prosodic and lexical factors. Prosodic influences predominate in the first steps of the developmental process, while lexical influences emerge in later steps.

In three studies, two-year-old children communicated to a parent which of two out-of-reach objects contained a sticker. Across trials, the objects were positioned in different configurations so that it was possible or impossible for a child's pointing gesture to unambiguously specify one object. In Study 1, the objects used were two boxes distinguished by a different picture of a vehicle on the front, and children (n = 16; mean age 2;8) were significantly more likely to name the box's picture on trials where pointing alone could not unambiguously specify the box than on trials where it could. In Studies 2 and 3, the stickers were hidden inside different animal figures. Older two-year-olds (n = 16, mean age 2;9), but not younger two-year-olds (n = 16, mean age 2;4), showed an ability to recognize the referential (in)efficacy of their pointing gestures and to adapt their communication accordingly.

Three studies were carried out in order to account for development of word definitions. Study i was aimed at analysing the role of class inclusion skills and age (5– and 7–year-olds and adults) in production of definitions containing superordinate categorical terms. No differences were found between 7-year-olds who had passed a class inclusion task and those who had not passed it as regards number of definitions containing superordinates, while differences were found between younger and older children and between children and adults. Study 2 was aimed at obtaining some normative criteria on the ‘goodness’ of definitions provided in Study 1, by using adult judges. It was found that the best definitions are those which contain both categorical terms and specific information about the to-be-defined object. It was also found that adults may adjust their standard definitional criteria to the kind of interlocutor (i.e. a child or a Martian). Study 3 confirms that younger children's definitions fall far short of the adult informativeness and completeness criteria while, by the age of ten, such criteria are met. Overall results were interpreted as conforming to a progressive conventionalization of children's strategies for defining objects.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have well-documented problems in the use of tense-related grammatical morphemes. However, in English, tense often overlaps with aspect and modality. In this study, 15 children with SLI (mean age 5;2) and two groups of 15 typically developing children (mean ages 3;6 and 5;3) were compared in terms of their use of previously studied morphemes in contexts that more clearly assessed the role of aspect. The children's use of less frequently studied morphemes tied to modality or tense was also examined. The children with SLI were found to use -ing to mark progressive aspect in past as well as present contexts, even though they were relatively poor in using the tense morphemes (auxiliary was, were) that should accompany the progressive inflection. These children were inconsistent in their use of third person singular -s to describe habitual actions that were not occurring during the time of their utterance. However, the pattern of the children's use suggested that the source of the problem was the formal tense feature of the inflection, not the habitual action context. The children's use of modal can was comparable to that of the typically developing children, raising the possibility that the modality function of possibility had been learned without necessarily acquiring the tense feature of this morpheme. These children's proficiency with can suggests that their bare verb stem productions should probably not be re-interpreted as cases of missing modals. Together these findings suggest that the more serious tense-related problems seen in English-speaking children with SLI co-occur with a less impaired ability to express temporal relations through aspect and modality.

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in BSL, in comparison to a subset of children from Study 1 matched for age and BSL exposure. The two groups' results were comparable in most respects. However, the group with SLI made occasional word-finding errors and gave fewer responses in the first 15 seconds. We conclude that deaf children with SLI do not differ from their controls in terms of the semantic organization of the BSL lexicon, but that they access signs less efficiently.

Stokes (2010) compared the lexicons of English-speaking late talkers (LT) with those of their typically developing (TD) peers on neighborhood density (ND) and word frequency (WF) characteristics and suggested that LTs employed learning strategies that differed from those of their TD peers. This research sought to explore the cross-linguistic validity of this conclusion. The lexicons (production, not recognition) of 208 French-speaking two-year-old children were coded for ND and WF. Regression revealed that ND and WF together predicted 62% of the variance in vocabulary size, with ND and WF uniquely accounting for 53% and 9% of that variance respectively. Epiphenomenal findings were ruled out by comparison of simulated data sets with the actual data. A generalized Mann–Whitney test showed that children with small vocabularies had significantly higher ND values and significantly lower WF values than children with large vocabularies. An extended statistical learning theory is proposed to account for the findings.

The relationship between the acquisition of gone and the development of the object concept is investigated. Children acquire gone at the same time that they solve serial invisible displacement tasks, in a transitional period in the development of the object concept. According to a ‘neo-piagetian’ account of the object concept, children move from using specific rules to predict the reappearance of objects, to using a general theory of object movements during this period. The children's uses of gone suggest that gone encodes the fact that the child does not perceive an existing object. This concept is an essential component of the new theory of objects developed in this period. Children seem to acquire gone when they are in the midst of developing the concept that gone encodes, which may explain why they acquire the word in this period. In this case, conceptual development does not precede semantic development; rather, conceptual and semantic development appear to proceed simultaneously.

The development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish is found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use. The data come from four monolingual child Catalan-speakers (from the Serrà & Solé corpus) and one monolingual child Spanish-speaker (from the Linaza corpus) who were studied longitudinally from 1:0 to 3; 6, approximately. The simultaneous emergence of tense and number morphology on one hand and overt subjects on the other in the children's speech is taken as evidence that a particular aspect of Universal Grammar, Case Theory, determines the possible co-occurrences of verbal inflections and subject types in developing grammatical systems. Parallels in verbal inflectional development are found in other child languages, while such parallels are not found in regard to subject use. Possible modifications to Case Theory, which would allow a unified account of the cross-linguistic developmental patterns of subject use, are considered. The possibility of explaining the early absence of overt subjects in these null subject languages as the result of an early sentence processing deficit is explored and rejected. The children's knowledge of whether their language is a null subject or overt subject language even before acquiring adult-like verbal inflection is taken as further evidence for what has been called ‘early convergence’ on parameter settings.

Although cross-linguistic influence at the level of morphosyntax is one of the most intensively studied topics in child bilingualism, the circumstances under which it occurs remain unclear. In this meta-analysis, we measured the effect size of cross-linguistic influence and systematically assessed its predictors in 750 simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children in 17 unique language combinations across 26 experimental studies. We found a significant small to moderate average effect size of cross-linguistic influence, indicating that cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of bilingual development. Language dominance, operationalized as societal language, was a significant predictor of cross-linguistic influence, whereas surface overlap, language domain and age were not. Perhaps an even more important finding was that definitions and operationalisations of cross-linguistic influence and its predictors varied considerably between studies. This could explain the absence of a comprehensive theory in the field. To solve this issue, we argue for a more uniform method of studying cross-linguistic influence.

The aim of this study was to compare linguistic and narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual preschoolers and to estimate linguistic predictors of the macro-structural level of narratives. A battery of linguistic measures in Italian was administered to sixty-four Monolinguals and sixty-four Early Bilinguals; it included Vocabulary, Phonological Awareness, Morphosyntactic Comprehension, Phonological Memory, Letter Knowledge, and Story Sequencing tasks. The narratives produced in the Story Sequencing task were coded. Bilinguals underachieved, compared to monolinguals, in vocabulary, phonological awareness and morphosyntactic comprehension; they also differed in Type and Token indexes and in free morphology, but not in the level of macro-structural complexity. Macro-structural parameters were predicted by Mean Length of Utterances in monolinguals, but not in bilinguals. Bilingual children are able to structure stories in their L2 with monolingual-like cohesive complexity, although ‘in few words', that is, with weak L2 linguistic skills.