In Pizzuto & Caselli (1992, hereafter: P&C) we provided an overview of morphological development in Italian, focusing on three aspects of free speech production (verbs, pronouns and articles), in the longitudinal records of three children. We analysed our data using criteria appropriate to allow reliable cross-linguistic comparisons with data from English. By this means we evaluated the plausibility of a nativist, parameter-setting account of language development in Italian and English, as proposed for these two languages by Hyams (1986a b; 1987; 1988). We concluded that our data did not support the strong predictions made within such a parameter-setting account, and that the developmental patterns observed were best explained by a combination of cognitive, perceptual and distributional factors of the sort that are proposed in most other models of language acquisition.

Children's ability to refer is underpinned by their developing cognitive skills. Using a production task (n = 57), we examined pre-articulatory visual fixations to contrast objects (e.g., to a large apple when the target was a small one) to investigate how visual scanning drives informativeness across development. Eye-movements reveal that although four-year-olds fixate contrast objects to a similar extent as seven-year-olds and adults, this does not result in explicit referential informativeness. Instead, four-year-olds frequently omit distinguishing information from their referring expressions regardless of the comprehensiveness of their visual scan. In contrast, older children make greater use of information gleaned from their visual inspections, like adults. Thus, we find a barrier not to the incidence of contrast fixations by younger children, but to their use of them in referential informativeness. We recommend that follow-up work investigates whether younger children's immature executive skills prevent them from describing referents in relation to contrast objects.

According to the AGREEMENT/TENSE (Agr/Tns) OMISSION MODEL, children's failure to produce finite verb morphemes represents the selection of an optional infinitive form, in which tense and/or agreement is not specified. When agreement is specified, nominative case is licensed. Following the assumptions of this model, a child's utterance such as She run reflects a failure to specify tense only, given that the subject pronoun shows nominative case. We tested this assumption in two studies through the analysis of spontaneous speech samples from young typically-developing (TD) children and children with specific language impairment (SLI). In Study 1, 15 children were included (TD aged 2;1–3;11, SLI aged 4;0–6;2); in Study 2, 33 children were included (TD aged 2;5–3;11, SLI aged 3;6–6;9). We determined whether there was a relationship between the children's use of past tense -ed and their use of third person singular -s and copula is when nominative case was also used. Because nominative case was used, any failures to produce third person singular -s and copula is should be attributable to tense and not agreement. Such use should therefore be related to the children's use of -ed which presumably hinges on tense only. However, a relationship was not found in the speech of either group of children. This was true both for the children in each group who were consistent in using nominative case pronouns and for those who were not. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed.

This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children favor harmony pattern in their production of the languages. In the language where harmony is non-dominant, children's subsequent production entirely reverses the pattern so that harmony predominates. This differs starkly from adults. Our results compare to the regularization found in child learning of morphosyntactic variation, suggesting a role for naturalness in variable phonological learning.

Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues’ respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English–French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that, in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.

English-learning children have been shown to reliably use cues from argument structure in learning verbs. However, languages pair overtly expressed arguments with verbs to varying extents, raising the question of whether children learning all languages expect the same, universal mapping between arguments and relational roles. Three experiments examined this question by asking how strongly early-learned verbs by themselves, without their corresponding explicitly expressed arguments, point to ‘conceptual arguments’ – the relational roles in a scene. Children aged two to four years and adult speakers of two languages that differ structurally in terms of whether the arguments of a verb are explicitly expressed more (English) or less (Tamil) frequently were compared in their mapping of verbs, presented without any overtly expressed arguments, to a range of scenes. The results suggest different developmental trajectories for language learners, as well as different patterns of adult interpretation, and offer new ways of thinking about the nature of verbs cross-linguistically.

Irish is a rapidly changing minority language spoken as the main community language in some areas of the officially Irish-speaking Gaeltacht regions in Ireland. We analyse narratives from 17 parent–child dyads, living in one such area. All children, aged 3–6;4, had high exposure to the local variety of Irish. The input quality was measured by specifying consistency and accuracy of use of morphosyntactic forms in parental narratives directed to their children. The same morphosyntactic forms were analysed in narrative retell by the children. The children produced with high accuracy those forms that the parents used consistently and accurately. For the forms where parents’ usage was inconsistent, large variation in the children's usage was observed. The findings suggest that consistency and accuracy in the use of morphosyntactic forms in the parental language is an important factor in language acquisition; however, its influence might be confounded by other factors.

Young children adopt an event-chaining strategy when storytelling, frequently linking clauses with and. The current study tested whether age-related changes in clause-initial and usage might index narrative structure development in the Eugene Children's Story Corpus (ECSC), which includes 180 structured spontaneous narratives elicited yearly for three years from 60 children, aged five to seven at study onset. The narratives were segmented into clauses to quantify clause-initial and usage. Adult judgments of narrative coherence and cohesiveness were elicited as measures of narrative structure. Mean length of utterance (MLU) and clause (MLC) were used as measures of language complexity. Results indicated developmental increases in all measures, but only and-connected dependent clause usage increased with cross-sectional and longitudinal age. Only MLC predicted the relative frequency of clause-initial and regardless of children's age. These results suggest children's frequent use of and to connect events reflects immature language; its association with flat narrative structure is likely epiphenomenal.

Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vibrant signing community and applies the same feature analysis to adult and child data. We analyse longitudinal data of four deaf children from the Kata Kolok Child Signing Corpus. The form comparison of child productions and adult targets yields three main findings: i) handshape modifications are most frequent, echoing cross-linguistic patterns; ii) modification rates of other features differ from previous studies, possibly due to differences in methodology or KK’s phonology; iii) co-occurrence of modifications within a sign suggest feature interdependencies. We argue that nuanced approaches to child signing are necessary to understand the complexity of early signing.

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials “after”, “before”, “because”, and “if” in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00–4;07). In comparing mothers’ and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

Ravid & Tolchinsky present a valuable framework for understanding the development of metalinguistic knowledge (i.e. grasp of language form as opposed to content). Although this framework makes an admirable contribution, we question the authors' emphasis on familiarity with written language as an enabling condition, and instead outline an approach that makes more obvious provision for cognitive foundations and early development. This approach attempts to locate the development of metalinguistic understanding within the context of domain-general and age-related changes in cognitive function – in particular, increases in the complexity of representational structures involved in conscious reflection.

Production studies show that both Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and bilingual children for whom Russian is a non-dominant language have difficulty distinguishing between the near-synonymous connectives i ‘and’ and a ‘and/but’. I is a preferred connective when reference is maintained, whereas a is normally used for reference shift. We report an eye-tracking experiment comparing connective processing by Russian-speaking monolinguals with typical language development (TLD) with that of Russian–Dutch bilinguals and Russian-speaking monolinguals with SLI (age 5–6). The results demonstrate that the processing profiles of monolinguals with TLD and bilinguals are similar: both groups use connective semantics immediately for predicting further discourse. In contrast, children with SLI do not show sensitivity to these semantic differences. Despite similar production profiles, bilinguals and monolinguals with SLI are clearly different in connective processing. We discuss the implications of these results for the possible causes of the errors in the two populations.

According to Schlesinger (1973) there are two errors in our research on language development: (a) we attribute too much underlying structure to child utterances; (b) we interpret child language in terms of adult language. In response, we restate the types of evidence we have used to derive semantic representations for child utterances, and emphasize that only such representations can make sense of the way the child uses his language. One of the reasons that child sentences are brief in comparison with the structure they communicate is that the child communicates by using the immediate situation. He constructs parts of the semantic structure not conceptually but at the sensory–motor level and communicates them deictically. Nevertheless the entire structure is under the child's control. We further clarify our notion of adverbial, which has permitted us to conclude that adverbials are absent in very early speech.

Language is conventional because word meanings are shared among different people. The present study examined Chinese infants’ understanding of the language convention that different people should generalize words in the same way. Thirteen-month-old Mandarin-speaking Chinese infants repeatedly viewed a speaker providing a novel label for a target object in the presence of a distractor object. Next, the objects changed colour and infants viewed the same speaker and a new speaker providing the label for either the different coloured target or distractor. They were also asked by both speakers to locate the correct referent of the label. Results revealed that infants expected both speakers to generalize the label to objects that belonged to the target category. This is the first evidence demonstrating that Chinese infants perceive word generalization as a form of shared convention.

A set of sentences written in either an expanded or optionally deleted form were read for imitation and delayed recall to a group of nursery school children. A similar set of sentences had been presented for recall to adults. The older children and adults tended to recall the sentences in deleted forms, regardless of their input form. The youngest child tested, however, recalled the sentences in a fully expanded form, even when they had been presented and imitated in deleted form. The results offer support for the hypothesis of memory for non-linguistic ideas by both children and adults, as well as a demonstration of Slobin's (1973) universal operating principle that when children are first gaining control of an optionally deletable linguistic entity, they will often produce only its full form.

Previous work bas demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This ACTIONALITY EFFECT bas been reportee to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5;0–7;11. The actionality effect was studied by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate—argument structure of the sentences were presented to the subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvisualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence actionality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also suggest that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualizers demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvisualizers, whereas the reverse was true for nonactional sentences. Mental image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sentence comprehension.

This case study is based on the longitudinal data of a girl (LYC, 1 ; 2–3 ; 3) acquiring Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) as her first language, and it aims to discover the overgeneralization pattern of children acquiring causatives in TSM. Among the three types of causative, the errors found in other languages are mostly with lexical causatives; however, in TSM, the errors occur with morphological and analytic causatives. Being an analytic language, TSM tends to spell out the causative meaning through morphological and analytic causatives and thus most errors occur with these two types. In contrast, lexical causatives, which contain a semantic element CAUSE, were acquired late; in the data collected (1 ; 2–3 ; 3) lexical causatives were not yet found. This case study provides evidence from TSM to show a different overgeneralization pattern.

We analyzed the effect of infant-directed speech (IDS) on multimodal communicative production of children at the beginning of the second year of life in two different languages: Spanish and Basque. Twelve Spanish and twelve Basque children aged between 12 and 15 months observed two versions of an audiovisual story: one version was narrated with IDS and the other with adult-directed speech (ADS). We analyzed the use of gaze and the communicative behaviors produced by children. The time spent looking at the story increases in the IDS condition regardless of the language of the narration. Children produced more multimodal communicative behaviors while watching the IDS version both in Spanish and in Basque. These results suggest that IDS increases attention and social engagement promoting joint attention episodes.