Segmental variation in maternal speech to children changes over time. This study investigated variation in non-citation speech processes in a longitudinal, 26-hour corpus of maternal northern Australian English. Recordings were naturalistic parent–child interactions when children (N=4) were 1;6, 2;0, and 2;6. The mothers' speech was phonetically transcribed and analyzed. Based on previous sociophonetic research showing proportional changes in speech variants in maternal speech as children get older, it was predicted that deletion of word-initial /h/ and word-final /v/, processes common in non-citation speech, would increase over time. Instead results showed a non-linear change in deletion within a stable set of lexical items. Deletion proportionately increased between 1;6 and 2;0 and decreased between 2;0 and 2;6. Further analysis indicated increased deletion was not accounted for by changes in speech rate, which only marginally increased over time. Findings suggest mothers fine-tune differentially over time as children's receptive and productive language knowledge develops.

Young English-speaking children often produce utterances with missing 3sg -s (e.g., *He play). Since the mid 1990s, such errors have tended to be treated as Optional Infinitive (OI) errors, in which the verb is a non-finite form (e.g., Wexler, 1998; Legate & Yang, 2007). The present article reports the results of a cross-sectional elicited-production study with 22 children (aged 3;1–4;1), which investigated the possibility that at least some apparent OI errors reflect a process of defaulting to the form with the highest frequency in the input. Across 48 verbs, a significant negative correlation was observed between the proportion of ‘bare’ vs. 3sg -s forms in a representative input corpus and the rate of 3sg -s production. This finding suggests that, in addition to other learning mechanisms that yield such errors cross-linguistically, at least some of the OI errors produced by English-speaking children reflect a process of defaulting to a high-frequency/phonologically simple form.

Two experiments tested how faithfully German children aged 4 ;5  to 5 ;6  reproduce ditransitive sentences that are unmarked or marked with respect to word order and focus (Exp1) or definiteness (Exp2). Adopting an optimality theory (OT) approach, it is assumed that in the German adult grammar word order is ranked lower than focus and definiteness. Faithfulness of children's reproductions decreased as markedness of inputs increased; unmarked structures were reproduced most faithfully and unfaithful outputs had most often an unmarked form. Consistent with the OT proposal, children were more tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for focus; in conflict with the proposal, children were less tolerant against inputs marked for word order than for definiteness. Our results suggest that the linearization of objects in German double object constructions is affected by focus and definiteness, but that prosodic principles may have an impact on the position of a focused constituent.

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.

In the present study we investigate the production of gesture, intonation, and eye-gaze within the proto-imperative behaviour of one English child aged 1;0 to 1;7. The study is based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the three behaviours. The results indicate a shift from reaching gestures to points, and from rising terminal pitch contours to non-rising contours. The analysis also highlights changes in eye-gaze to the co-participant over time. In addition we identify a significant relationship between pitch contour and gesture type within the sample, with points being more closely associated with non-rise intonation than reaching gestures. We suggest that the changes in proto-imperative behaviour signal a shift in the underlying representation of the function from a request for help to a demand for a particular object, and that this development paves the way for the subsequent conventional linguistic expression of the imperative function.

The present study investigated Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the polarity sensitive item renhe ‘any’ in Mandarin Chinese. Like its English counterpart any, renhe can be used as a negative polarity item (NPI), or as a free choice (FC) item, and both the distribution and interpretation of renhe are governed by the same syntactic and semantic constraints as English any. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, the present study tested five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of FC renhe in sentences containing the modal word neng ‘can’, and tested children's comprehension of NPI renhe in sentences containing the temporal conjunction zai…zhiqian ‘before’. Most children demonstrated knowledge of the interpretation of both FC renhe and NPI renhe despite a paucity of relevant adult input. Like adults, however, Mandarin-speaking children do not use renhe frequently in ordinary conversation, due to the availability of alternative colloquial expressions (wh-pronouns) that also convey children's intended meanings.

This study investigated the integration of word- and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by twenty-five school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and twenty-five adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and amplitude measures of syllable rhymes were used to assess the realization of lexical stress, and fundamental frequency (F0) measures were used to assess the realization of phrasal pitch accents across conditions. Results showed that the duration and F0 correlates varied independently of each other as a function of condition in child speech, but much less so in adult speech. The group differences were taken to indicate that six-year-old children have yet to develop prosodic structures with integrated prominence. Structural and pragmatic interpretations of the results are discussed.

Typically, the point vowels [i,ɑ,u] are acoustically more peripheral in infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). If caregivers seek to highlight lexically relevant contrasts in IDS, then two sounds that are contrastive should become more distinct, whereas two sounds that are surface realizations of the same underlying sound category should not. To test this prediction, vowels that are phonemically contrastive ([i–ɪ] and [eɪ–ε]), vowels that map onto the same underlying category ([æ–] and [ε–]), and the point vowels [i,ɑ,u] were elicited in IDS and ADS by American English mothers of two age groups of infants (four- and eleven-month-olds). As in other work, point vowels were produced in more peripheral positions in IDS compared to ADS. However, there was little evidence of hyperarticulation per se (e.g. [i–ɪ] was hypoarticulated). We suggest that across-the-board lexically based hyperarticulation is not a necessary feature of IDS.

The current study investigated the role of resumption in the interpretation of object relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Sixty-four (N=64) children aged 3;2–6;0 (M=4;8) completed a referent selection task that tested their comprehension of subject RCs, gapped object RCs, and object RCs containing either a resumptive pronoun or an object clitic. The results showed that the presence of a resumptive element (pronoun or clitic) had a facilitative effect on children's processing of object RCs. In both cases object RCs with resumptive elements were interpreted more accurately than gapped subject and object RCs, suggesting that resumptive elements ease processing burden in syntactically complex contexts because they provide local cues to thematic role assignment.

Despite evidence that early narrative abilities are predictive of literacy skills and academic achievement, only limited progress has been made in understanding how the development of these narrative skills can be facilitated. The current study measured the effectiveness of a new narrative intervention conducted with 26 preschoolers. Children were assigned to one of two intervention conditions: an active-choice condition (able to choose story components) or a no-choice condition (story components were preselected). Both groups otherwise received the same explicit and engaging teaching of story grammar. As predicted, greater narrative skill gains were evident for the active-choice intervention; including larger gains on both central story grammar components and story information overall. Future implications for how stories might be presented to young children in order to more richly facilitate narrative skill acquisition are discussed.