The present study1 exposed five-year-olds (M=5 ; 2), seven-year-olds (M=7 ; 6) and adults (M=22 ; 4) to instances of a novel phrasal construction, then used a forced choice comprehension task to evaluate their learning of the construction. The abstractness of participants' acquired representations of the novel construction was evaluated by varying the degree of lexical overlap that test items had with exposure items. We found that both child groups were less proficient than adults, but seven-year-olds showed evidence of across-the-board generalization whereas five-year-olds were sensitive to lexical overlap at test. This outcome is consistent with more conservative, item-based learning of syntactic patterns in younger children. Additionally, unlike adults and seven-year-olds, five-year-olds showed no evidence of having mastered the novel construction's linking rules. Thus, younger learners are less likely to generalize abstract argument structure constructions when exposed to the same systematic input as older learners.

This study investigates three- to five-year-old children's interpretation of disjunction in sentences like ‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or the bunny’. English disjunction has a conjunctive interpretation in such sentences (‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle and before the bunny’). This interpretation conforms with classical logic. Mandarin disjunction (‘huozhe’) can take scope over ‘before’ (‘zai … zhiqian’), so the same sentence can mean ‘The dog reached the finish line before the turtle or before the bunny (I don't know which)’. If children are guided by adult input in the acquisition of sentence meanings, English- and Mandarin-speaking children should assign different interpretations to such sentences. If children are guided by logical principles, then children acquiring either language should initially assign the conjunctive interpretation of disjunction. A truth-value judgment task was used to test this prediction and English- and Mandarin-speaking children were found to behave similarly.

Various measures for identifying the onset of babbling have been proposed in the literature, but a formal definition of the exact procedure and a thorough validation of the sample size required for reliably establishing babbling onset is lacking. In this paper the reliability of five commonly used measures is assessed using a large longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech from forty infants (age 0 ; 6−2 ; 0). In a first experiment it is shown that establishing the onset of babbling with reasonable (95%) confidence is impossible when the measures are computed only once, and when the number of vocalizations are not equal for all children at all ages. In addition, each measure requires a different minimal sample size. In the second experiment a robust procedure is proposed and formally defined that permits the identification of the onset of babbling with 95% confidence. The bootstrapping procedure involves extensive resampling and requires relatively few data.

This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture description task was used to set appropriate semantic contexts to prompt the production of scrambled structures. The results demonstrate that the children scrambled at higher rates in definite/partitive contexts than in indefinite/non-specific contexts. This suggests that children are susceptible to the same semantic features that are associated with NP scrambling in adult production. However, they differ from adults in pronominal scrambling and approximate adult scrambling behaviour only around four to five years. These findings underline the complex nature of syntax/semantics/phonology correlation in scrambling, and contribute to our understanding of the issue of optionality in child and adult grammar.

We tracked the developmental influences of exposure to French on developing English phonological awareness, decoding and reading comprehension of English-speaking at-risk readers from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Teacher-nominated at-risk readers were matched with not-at-risk readers in French immersion and English language programs. Exposure to spoken French phonetic and syllabic forms and to written French orthographic and morphological forms by children attending French immersion programs was expected to promote phonological, decoding and reading comprehension achievement. Growth in all outcomes was found, with children in immersion experiencing higher final status in phonological awareness and more rapid growth and higher final status in decoding, using multilevel modeling. At-risk readers in French immersion experienced faster growth and higher final status in reading comprehension. Benefits to reading of exposure to an additional language are discussed in relation to cross-language transfer, phonological grain size and enhanced executive control processes.

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) arguments have instigated considerable debate in the recent linguistics literature. This article uses the comparative method to challenge the logic of POS arguments. Rather than question the premises of POS arguments, the article demonstrates how POS arguments for individual languages lead to a reductio ad absurdum as POS arguments from genetically related languages are compared. Comparison leads to different contradictions for poverty of the negative stimulus (PONS) and poverty of the positive stimulus (POPS) arguments. Comparing PONS arguments leads to the conclusion that Universal Grammar contains language-specific versions of linguistic rules. Comparing POPS arguments leads to the conclusion that Universal Grammar may supply knowledge that is ungrammatical in the target language. The reductio shows that universal principles of grammar cannot be established on the basis of POS arguments from a single language.

Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, Küntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-causative actions via Intermodal Preferential Looking. The novel verbs were presented in transitive or intransitive frames; the NPs in the transitive frames appeared ‘bare’ or with case markers. Consistent with previous findings of Morphosyntactic Bootstrapping, children who heard the novel verbs in the transitive frame with case markers reliably assigned those verbs to the novel causative actions.

Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the production of object gestures and gestural routines was positively correlated with the use of all the word categories. Comprehension of common nouns was positively correlated to the production of common nouns and predicates, whereas the comprehension of predicates was negatively correlated to the production of common nouns and social terms. The older the children were the more they produced words from each category. Girls were reported to produce more social terms. First-born children had an advantage over later-born children in the production of common nouns. Maternal educational level was associated with the production of common nouns and predicates.