Major large-scale research projects in the early years of developmental psycholinguistics were English-based, yet even then numerous studies were available or under way in a range of different languages (Ferguson & Slobin, 1973). Since then, the field of cross-linguistic child language research has burgeoned in several directions. First, rich information is now available on the acquisition of dozens of languages from around the world in numerous language families, spearheaded by the five-volume series edited by Slobin (1985–1997) and complemented by in-depth examination of specific constructions – e.g. causative alternation, motion verbs, passive voice, subject elision, noun compounding – in various languages, culminating in an in-depth examination of the acquisition of ergativity in over a dozen languages (Bavin & Stoll, 2013). A second fruitful direction is the application of carefully comparable designs targeting a range of issues among children acquiring different languages, including: production of early lexico-grammatical constructions (Slobin, 1982), sentence processing comprehension (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), expression of spatial relations (Bowerman, 2011), discourse construction of oral narratives based on short picture series (Hickmann, 2003) and longer storybooks (Berman & Slobin, 1994), and extended texts in different genres (Berman, 2008). Taken together, research motivated by the question of what is particular and what universal in child language highlights the marked, and early, impact of ambient language typology on processes of language acquisition. The challenge remains to operationalize such insights by means of psychologically sound and linguistically well-motivated measures for evaluating the interplay between the variables of developmental level, linguistic domain, and ambient language typology.

The current study used a forced choice pointing paradigm to examine whether English children aged 2 ; 1 can use abstract knowledge of the relationship between word order position and semantic roles to make an active behavioural decision when interpreting active transitive sentences with novel verbs, when the actions are identical in the target and foil video clips. The children pointed significantly above chance with novel verbs but only if the final trial was excluded. With familiar verbs the children pointed consistently above chance. Children aged 2 ; 7 did not show these tiring effects and their performance in the familiar and novel verb conditions was always equivalent.

Crain, S. & Thornton, R. Investigations in Universal Grammar. Cambridge: MIT, 1998.

Stephen Crain (C) & Rosalind Thornton (T) have garnered a well-deserved reputation for their unwavering commitment to language learnability as a constraint not only on theories of child language and language development but also on experimental design and the interpretation of experimental findings. In his well-known defense of children's early knowledge of syntactic constraints, Crain (1991) argued for the widely-held position that the best solution to the learnability problem is to assume that grammatical knowledge which cannot be learned on the basis of experience is specified in advance as part of the human biological endowment for language in the form of a UNIVERSALGRAMMAR (UG) (Chomsky, 1965). With respect to experimental design, C&T have strongly maintained that even young children know UG constraints but perform poorly in some experiments-due to the extralinguistic demands associated with experimental tasks, particularly those involved in presupposition accommodation and complex response planning. C&T specifically design their experiments to reduce the impact of extralinguistic demands on children's linguistic performance while at the same time providing felicitous environments for adultlike performance.

English-acquiring children frequently make pronoun case errors, while German-acquiring children rarely do. Nonetheless, German-acquiring children frequently make article case errors. It is proposed that when child-directed speech contains a high percentage of case-ambiguous forms, case errors are common in child language; when percentages are low, case errors are rare. Input to English and German children was analyzed for percentage of case-ambiguous personal pronouns on adult tiers of corpora from 24 English-acquiring and 24 German-acquiring children. Also analyzed for German was the percentage of case-ambiguous articles. Case-ambiguous pronouns averaged 63·3% in English, compared with 7·6% in German. The percentage of case-ambiguous articles in German was 77·0%. These percentages align with the children's errors reported in the literature. It appears children may be sensitive to levels of ambiguity such that low ambiguity may aid error-free acquisition, while high ambiguity may blind children to case distinctions, resulting in errors.

In two experiments, the early acquisition of spatial adjectives is examined. In Experiment 1, 3- to 4-year-old and 4- to 5-year-old English children were tested for their comprehension of big, tall and long. In general, comprehension of all three adjectives improved with age, but in confirmation of Maratsos (1973) there was a sharp increase with age in one particular type of error: when asked to select the bigger of two objects, older children frequently chose the taller but smaller member of the pair. Further analysis showed that those older children who understood the word tall were especially likely to make this error. In Experiment 2, Dutch children of the same age were tested for their comprehension of groot (meaning ‘big’) and lang (meaning both ‘tall’ and ‘long’). Dutch children were also prone to choose the taller of two objects when asked to point to the bigger one, although Dutch does not possess a spatial adjective such as tall that refers exclusively to the vertical dimension. The implications of the findings for the acquisition of spatial adjectives, and for theories of semantic development are discussed.

The ‘problem of the error-free progressive’ (Brown 5973) was reexamined. It was hypothesized that young children make errors with the progressive as part of a developmental process. An experiment designed to elicit present-tense verbs is described, using 36 pictures, illustrating 9 process and g stative verbs. Twenty-two children (4; 2 to 6; 6) were tested: all responded mainly in the present tense, and 10 out of 22 produced over-generalizations of the progressive to stative verbs. It is argued that resistance to the progressive is based on a semantic distinction that is modified subsequently in accordance with adult use.

This study investigates forms and functions of the perfect in 22 preschool children. Children retold and re-enacted two-sentence stories which modelled the perfect. Although the perfect appeared to be emerging in imitative speech, including certain ungrammatical forms, children varied in the extent to which they used it and appreciated its meaning of current relevance. Three factors were found to influence children's selective imitation and paraphrasing of the perfect: form of the verb (present perfect versus perfect progressive), semantic sense of the perfect, and duration of the lexical verb. Children's performance demonstrates the need to consider not only the developmental frequency of advanced, optional verb forms but the generality of their use and their relation to the child's lexicon.

Cross-linguistic studies have shown that typically developing children have difficulties comprehending non-canonical structures. These findings have been interpreted within the Relativized Minimality (RM) approach, according to which local relations cannot be established between two terms of a dependency if an intervening element possesses similar morphosyntactic features. In an extension of RM, Friedmann, Belletti, and Rizzi (2009) suggested that lexical NP restriction is the source of minimality effects in non-canonical sentences. The present study aimed at investigating whether the predictions of their account can be confirmed in Greek. Our results indicate that although lexical NP restriction is a crucial factor in generating minimality effects, it is not always sufficient to account for the comprehension difficulties that young children face with non-canonical sentences, since the internal structure (i.e. the feature specification) of the moved element and of the intervener affects their performance, as well.

This study investigated the role of sequential processing in spoken language outcomes for children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), ages 5;3–11;4, by comparing them to children with typical hearing (TH), ages 6;3–9;7, on sequential learning and memory tasks involving easily nameable and difficult-to-name visual stimuli. Children who are DHH performed more poorly on easily nameable sequencing tasks, which positively predicted receptive vocabulary scores. Results suggest sequential learning and memory may underlie delayed language skills of many children who are DHH. Implications for language development in children who are DHH are discussed.

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds’ exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives in child-directed speech (CDS); and (ii) investigate how features of the input might scaffold adjective acquisition. In our novel corpus of UK English, adjectives occurred more frequently in prenominal than in postnominal (predicative) syntactic frames, though postnominal frames were more frequent for less-familiar adjectives. They occurred much more frequently with a descriptive than a contrastive function, especially for less-familiar adjectives. Our findings present a partial mismatch between the forms of adjectives found in real-world CDS and those forms that have been shown to be more useful for learning. We discuss implications for models of adjective acquisition and for clinical practice.

This longitudinal case study documents the emergence of bilingualism in a young monolingual Mandarin boy on the basis of an acoustic analysis of his vowel productions recorded via a picture-naming task over 20 months following his enrollment in an all-English (L2) preschool at the age of 3;7. The study examined (1) his initial L2 vowel space, (2) the process of L1-L2 separation, and (3) his L1 vowel system in relation to L2. The child initially utilized his L1 base in building the L2 vowel system. The L1-L2 separation started from a drastic restructuring of his working vowel space to create maximal contrast between the two languages. Meanwhile, L1 developmental processes and influence of L2 on L1 were also in effect. The developmental profile of this child uncovered strategies sequential bilingual children may use to restructure their phonetic space and construct a new system of contrasts in L2.

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an action. In subsequent interactions children were asked to get ‘the X’ or ‘a X’. When children were instructed with the definite article they chose the shared object significantly more often than when they were instructed with the indefinite article in which case children's choice was at chance. The findings show that in their third year children use shared experiences to interpret the speaker's communicative intention underlying her referential choice. The results are discussed with respect to children's representation of linguistic categories and the role of joint action for establishing common ground.

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7–8 years of age) but not younger (4–5 years) children integrate co-referential gestures into their interpretation of pronouns. This is the same age at which they show sensitivity to order-of-mention, the only other cue available in the stimuli. Interestingly, when children show sensitivity to the gestures, they are quite similar to adults, in that gestures consistent with order-of-mention increase first-mentioned responses as compared to stimuli with no gestures, but only slightly, while gestures inconsistent with order-of-mention have a larger effect on interpretation, decreasing first-mentioned responses and increasing second-mentioned responses.

Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0–36 months who answered questions about the English-language books they most commonly read to their children. The inclusion of demographic information enables analysis of subsets of data based on age, sex, or caregivers’ education level. A comparison between our dataset and those used in previous analyses reveals that there is relatively little overlap between booklists gathered from proxies such as bestseller lists and the books caregivers reported reading to children in our survey. The IBDb is available for download for use by researchers at <http://linguistics.ubc.ca/ubc-ibdb/>.

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject–verb agreement were neutralized. For each trial, children chose between two videos (e.g., horse acting on cat versus cat acting on horse), both involving the same action. The children aged 2;6 comprehended S + object-pronoun + V (soprov) significantly better than S + V + object-noun (svonoun). We explain this in terms of cue collaboration between a low cost cue (case) and the firstargument = agent cue which we found to be reliable 76% of the time. The most difficult word order for all age groups was the object-pronoun + V + S (oprovs). We ascribe this difficulty to cue conflict between the two most frequent transitive frames found in CDS, namely V + object-noun and object-pronoun + V.

This study analyzes the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of children's relative clauses in spontaneous speech. Longitudinal data from five Japanese children are analyzed and compared with English data (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000). The results show that the relative clauses produced by Japanese children predominantly have stative/attributive predicates. Additionally, early relative clauses in Japanese are often used to identify a referent that is not present in the context of interaction. These findings contrast with Diessel & Tomasello's (2000) English data, and possible explanations include the input that children are exposed to, which reflects typological characteristics of noun modification in Japanese.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the function of word order, inflections and discourse context in the sentence comprehension process. Ten 2; 6 and ten 3; 6 Polish children acted out sentences with toys. The target sentences were either inflected or uninflected, and given inflectional information sentences were ordered SVO or OVS. Context sentences established given information which was in initial or final position in the target sentences. When inflectional information was available, all the children used it effectively with very little interference from OVS and new–given arrangements. In spite of the fact that word order distributes given and new information in adult Polish, children could utilize word order to recover semantic functions with uninflected sentence problems.

The current study used growth curve analysis to study the role of input during the acquisition of the English causal connective because and its German counterpart weil. The corpora of five German and five English children and their adult caretakers (age range 0;10–4;3) were analyzed for the amount as well as for the type of connective use – imitated, elicited, and independent. The growth curves showed that children's elicited use developed faster than their independent use; imitations were rare. Adult connective input was not found to function as a scaffold of children's connective use. Rather, the adult why/warum-questions played an important role in the acquisition of because and weil. In turn, children also used why/warum-questions to elicit causal responses from their caretakers, which shows that children were responsible for a great part of their own input.

Two experiments investigated the acquisition of English comparative adjective forms, Adj+er and more Adj. In Experiment 1, 72 children, four- and seven-years-old, indicated their preferences for the synthetic or periphrastic comparative form for 16 adjectives in a forced-choice judgement task; their responses were compared to those of a group of adults (Graziano-King, 2003). In Experiment 2, a group of 29 children, ranging in age from 5;1 to 10;9, and a group of 11 adults performed a forced-choice judgement task, similar to that of Experiment 1, and an elicited production task, responding to the same 32 adjectives for both tasks. The two studies together support an acquisition trajectory of three stages. In the first stage, children show no preference for either form of the comparative; in the second, they adopt a suffixation rule; and in the third, they abandon the general rule and become conservative learners, eventually reaching the adult target.

Previous research in child language shows that many aspects of language acquisition are frequency-linked. This study tests whether input or usage frequency predicts the order of acquisition and accuracy of a bilingual Greek–English child's English possessives. The child was followed longitudinally from age 2;6 to 3;11. Order of acquisition was comparable to that of same-aged monolingual children. The child's usage frequency and order of acquisition were highly correlated with input frequency, while her accuracy was not. We argue that the child's already-acquired Greek possessives facilitated acquisition of English possessives, even though the child's English input and usage frequencies were lower than in monolingual English children.