Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database with grammatical relations in the form of labeled dependency structures. We have produced a corpus of over 18,800 utterances (approximately 65,000 words) with manually curated gold-standard grammatical relation annotations. Using this corpus, we have developed a highly accurate data-driven parser for the English CHILDES data, which we used to automatically annotate the remainder of the English section of CHILDES. We have also extended the parser to Spanish, and are currently working on supporting more languages. The parser and the manually and automatically annotated data are freely available for research purposes.

In this study, age of onset (AoO) was investigated in five- and six-year-old bilingual Frisian–Dutch children. AoO to Dutch ranged between zero and four and had a positive effect on Dutch receptive vocabulary size, but hardly influenced the children's accurate use of Dutch inflection. The influence of AoO on vocabulary was more prominent than the influence of exposure. Regarding inflection, the reverse was found. Accuracy at using Frisian inflection emerged as a significant predictor; this transfer effect was modulated by lexical overlap between the two languages. This study shows that ‘the sooner the better’ does not necessarily hold for language development. In fact, for the correct use of inflection, it does not matter whether children start at age zero or four. For rapidly learning words in a new language it may be helpful to first build a substantial vocabulary in the first language before learning a new language.

The existing data concerning the effects of maternal speech on child language development are so conflicting that it is difficult to draw even tentative conclusions about this relationship. One potential contributor to this problem is our lack of information concerning the determinants of maternal speech. The present study was designed to separate those elements of maternal speech which are heavily influenced by child language levels from those that seem to represent the mother's consistent style or strategy for ‘teaching’ language. Syntactic, discourse, and communicative functions of mothers' speech were examined. Mothers of high-and low-level language children were compared when talking to their daughters and to another girl the same age as their daughter. Analysis indicated a striking amount of similarity and consistency in high vs. low mothers' speech to both their daughters and the other child. Those elements of maternal speech that did show differences tended to be features that are fairly easily monitored by mothers or are directly tied to child utterances.

Two groups of 3-year-old children (3:0–3;6 and 3;6–4;0) observed two actions of a toy. In one condition an older partner was absent while the subject watched both of the toy actions (fully ignorant partner), whereas in the other condition the partner witnessed one of the two actions together with the subject (partially ignorant partner). When asked about the toy's actions by their partially ignorant partner both age groups adjusted their answers to their partner's ignorance and mentioned only that action which was new to their partner. However, in their answers to their fully ignorant partner the younger children tended to provide insufficient information by mentioning only one instead of both actions.

This study investigated the development of noun definition by grade school children and adults (N = 100). Subjects were asked to define 15 common nouns in one of two conditions: with objects present or without objects present. Definitions were classified on the basis of perceptual attributes (CONCRETE), everyday usage (FUNCTIONAL) or a combination of these (COMBINATORIAL). Results were analysed with a 5 (Grade) × 2 (Condition × 3 (Category) Analysis of Variance which indicated no effects for condition, but a Grade × Category interaction. With increasing age, there was a shift from FUNCTIONAL to COMBINATORIAL definitions; CONCRETE definitions were infrequent for all grades. In addition, age changes were found in the forms of the definitions subjects produced. In contrast to the children, adults formulated definitions in a more complex Aristotelian form. It was concluded that noun definition is a metalinguistic ability which follows a course of development similar to that for the acquisition of word meaning.

The present study investigated whether children's representations of morphosyntactic information are abstract enough to guide early verb learning. Using an infant-controlled habituation paradigm with a switch design, Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 were habituated to two different events in which an object was engaging in an action. Each event was paired with a novel word embedded in a single intransitive verb sentence frame. The results indicated that only 40% of the children were able to map a novel verb onto the action when the mapping task was complex. However, by simplifying the mapping task, 88% of the children succeeded in verb–action mapping. There were no differences in perceptual salience between the agent and action switches in the task. These results provide strong evidence that Japanese-speaking children aged 1 ; 8 are able to use an intransitive verb sentence frame to guide early verb learning unless the mapping task consumes too much of their cognitive resources.

This study examined relationships between prelinguistic variables from the MacArthur-Bates CDI and the development of language comprehension and production in children with autism. Forty-four children were assessed at baseline and 6, 12, 24, 33 and 53 months later. Growth Curve Modeling was used to examine the extent to which three composite CDI variables and three CDI item groupings predicted language development over 4–5 years. When examined individually, prespeech and early gestures were significant predictors of change for both comprehension and production, but late gestures were not. In addition, initiating joint attention and games and routines predicted comprehension and production over 4–5 years, and conventional gestures also predicted production. When all factors were considered simultaneously, children's ability to participate in games and routines was the only significant predictor of language production over time. The results are discussed with regard to their implications for understanding the complex factors that affect developmental outcomes.

Children with Down syndrome typically have weaknesses in oral language, but it has been suggested that this domain may benefit from learning to read. Amongst oral language skills, vocabulary is a relative strength, although there is some evidence of difficulties in learning the phonological form of spoken words. This study investigated the effect of orthographic support on spoken word learning with seventeen children with Down syndrome aged seven to sixteen years and twenty-seven typically developing children aged five to seven years matched for reading ability. Ten spoken nonwords were paired with novel pictures; for half the nonwords the written form was also present. The spoken word learning of both groups did not differ and benefited to the same extent from the presence of the written word. This suggests that compared to reading-matched typically developing children, children with Down syndrome are not specifically impaired in phonological learning and benefit equally from orthographic support.

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics–pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds' interpretation of aspectual expressions such as arxizo (‘start’) and degree modifiers such as miso (‘half’) and mexri ti mesi (‘halfway’). Such expressions are known to give rise to scalar inferences crosslinguistically: for instance, start, even though compatible with expressions denoting completion (e.g. finish), is typically taken to implicate non-completion. Overall, our experiments reveal that children have limited success in deriving scalar implicatures from the use of aspectual verbs but they succeed with ‘discrete’ degree modifiers such as ‘half’. Furthermore, children are better at spontaneously computing scalar implicatures than judging the pragmatic appropriateness of scalar statements. Finally, children can suspend scalar implicatures in environments where they are not supported. We discuss implications of these results for the scope and limitations of children's ability to both acquire the lexical semantics of aspectuals and to compute implicatures as part of what the speaker means.

This paper is based upon a longitudinal study of L2 attrition in a bilingual child who grew up in an L2 migration background (Germany) and moved to the country of origin (Portugal) at the age of nine, experiencing a dominance shift from theL2 tothe L1. The study aims to analyze the effects of language loss in L2 German. Data collection started 3 weeks after the child's immersion in the Portuguese setting and ended 18 months later. Results show first effects of language attrition after 5 months of reduced exposure to German; 18 months later the informant showed severe word retrieval difficulties and was unable to produce complete sentences in her L2. The findings thus confirm the conclusions of other studies on child language attrition, which attest to strong effects of attrition when the loss of contact with the target language occurs in childhood.

Parents employ a special register when speaking to young children, containing features that mark it as appropriate for children who are beginning to acquire their language. Parental speech in English to 5 children (ages 0; 9–1; 6) and in Spanish to 4 children (ages 0; 8–1; 1 and 1; 6–1; 10) was analysed for the presence and distribution of these features. Thirty-four paralinguistic, prosodic, and interactional features were identified, and rate measures and proportions indicated developmental patterns and differences across languages. Younger children received a higher rate of features that marked affect; older children were addressed with more features that marked semantically meaningful speech. English-speaking parents relied comparatively more on paralinguistic and affective features, whereas Spanish-speaking parents used comparatively more interactional features. Despite these differences, there was a high degree of similarity across parents and languages for the most frequently occurring features.

Several theorists have proposed that children may interpret an ambiguous word by attending to the dimension that is most relevant in the immediate discourse context. The current study offers a direct test of this hypothesis. Children aged 2;6 and 3;4 (N = 24 in each group) were presented with a novel object with an unusual shape and texture and were told ‘This is a dacky one’. In the Shape-Relevant condition, two other objects' shapes were described before the target object was labelled (‘This is a round one; this is a square one’). In the Texture-Relevant condition, two preceding objects' textures were described (‘This is a smooth one; this is a fuzzy one’). Subsequent comprehension tests indicated that, in extending the novel adjective to other exemplars, children attended to the dimension that was most relevant to the preceding discourse context.

One child's lexical development was followed from 1; 1 to 1; 7 to look for possible causes of early word overextensions. Lexical acquisition was observed for comprehension and production through the use of a parental diary and systematic language sampling. In addition, 16 nonsense words were taught in 10 experimental sessions over a two-month period to control for phonological effects. The results isolated six distinct factors behind early word overextensions. It is concluded that overextensions should not constitute the primary data for the construction of theories of semantic acquisition.

This study focuses on morphophonology and frequency in past tense production. It was assessed whether Dutch five- and seven-year-old typically developing (TD) children and eight-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) produce the correct allomorph in regular, irregular, and novel past tense formation. Type frequency of the allomorph, token frequency and phonotactic probability (PP) of the novel verb form are considered. The results showed all groups were sensitive to the phonological cue. PP did not contribute to past tense inflection of novel verbs in any of the groups, but type frequency did in all three groups. Only the seven-year-old typically developing children relied on token frequency for inflection of regulars. The findings point to an important role of phonology and frequency in past tense acquisition for both TD children and children with SLI. We discuss how the SLI performance pattern relates to theories on SLI.

This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants’ performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to instrumental and sung versions of the same novel tunes whilst the parents completed an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing home musical interactions with their infants. Language development was assessed with a follow-up when the infants were 14-month-old (n = 26). The main results showed that 6-month-olds preferred listening to sung rather than instrumental melodies, and that self-reported high levels of parental singing with their infants [i] were associated with less pronounced preference for the sung over the instrumental version of the tunes at 6 months, and [ii] predicted significant advantages on the language outcomes in the second year. The results are interpreted in relation to conceptions of developmental plasticity.

This study examines whether lexical repetition, syntactic skills, and working memory (WM) affect children's syntactic-priming behavior, i.e. their tendency to adopt previously encountered syntactic structures. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children were primed with prenominal (e.g. the yellow cup) or relative clause (RC; e.g. the cup that is yellow) structures with or without lexical overlap and performed additional tests of productive syntactic skills and WM capacity. Results revealed a reliable syntactic-priming effect without lexical boost in both groups: SLI and TD children produced more RCs following RC primes than following prenominal primes. Grammaticality requirements influenced RC productions in that SLI children produced fewer grammatical RCs than TD children. Of the additional measures, WM positively affected how frequently children produced dispreferred RC structures, but productive syntactic skills had no effect. The results support an implicit-learning account of syntactic priming and emphasize the importance of WM in syntactic priming tasks.

This study examined two facets of the use of social cues for early word learning in parent–child dyads, where children had an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or were typically developing. In Experiment 1, we investigated word learning and generalization by children with ASD (age range: 3;01–6;02) and typically developing children (age range: 1;02–4;09) who were matched on language ability. In Experiment 2, we examined verbal and non-verbal parental labeling behaviors. First, we found that both groups were similarly able to learn a novel label using social cues alone, and to generalize this label to other representations of the object. Children who utilized social cues for word learning had higher language levels. Second, we found that parental cues used to introduce object labels were strikingly similar across groups. Moreover, parents in both groups adapted labeling behavior to their child's language level, though this surfaced in different ways across groups.

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which types of information leads to the induction of (lexical) categories, and to paradigm building. Regarding the acquisition of word order, it is shown how languages with fixed or variable word order profit from stable syntactic hyperschemas, but require a more detailed analyses of the form-function contingencies to identify the underlying, more specific semantic, syntactic and morphological patterns. At a theoretical level, it is shown how findings from acquisition and processing converge into new linguistic theories that aim to account for regular as well as irregular phenomena in language.

Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11–4 ; 0). The analysis took account of several lexical factors in addition to lexical input frequency, including the age of first production, production frequency, neighborhood density and number of phonemes. The results showed that lexical input frequency was a significant predictor of the age at which the accuracy level of cluster production in each word first reached 80%. The magnitude of the frequency effect differed across cluster types. Our findings indicate that some of the between-word variance found in the development of sound production can indeed be attributed to the frequency of words in the child's ambient language.