This paper examines two issues concerning the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: (1) How is the acquisition of grammatical morphemes influenced by prosodic and phonological characteristics of the language being learned? and (2) What sorts of prosodic and phonological properties do grammatical morphemes have that might aid children in applying particular segmentation strategies? To address these issues, we compared the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in a pair of morphosyntactically similar but prosodically different languages, namely Taiwan Mandarin Chinese (TMC) and Taiwanese (TW). We analyse the patterns of realization and omission of a highly frequent subset of grammatical morphemes in six children's speech, recorded between the ages 1;6 and 2;3. The results from the between-language comparisons suggest that rhythmic characteristics of languages can affect segmentation by providing different kinds of prosodic handles for children to grasp at.

In different languages children have been found to use past verb forms to express the meaning of ‘unreality’ during social pretend play. In this study, the verb forms used by 14 four-year-old Italian children in their pretend play were investigated. Results show that different Italian past verb forms tend to co-occur with different play activities. The imperfect occurs mainly when children plan and negotiate their pretend activities and marks the transition from a real to a pretend frame of reference. The present perfect occurs mainly when children implement their plans and communicate within a pretend frame that has already been established. Results of this study are discussed in comparison with findings on the pretend language of children speaking other languages.

Some conjunctions simultaneously convey speakers' presuppositions about the validity of propositions uttered and assertions of particular interclausal relations. Because conveys belief, if + indicative, uncertainty and if + subjunctive, disbelief. While all three conjuctions assert positive entailment, unless, which like if + indicative presupposes uncertainty, asserts negative entailment or denial. The relationship between pragmatic knowledge and reasoning was explored by asking 12 males and 12 females at each of three ages (12, 15, adult) to solve written syllogisms containing the four conjunctions and evaluate single sentences for their pragmatic content. In the pragmatic task, belief was easier to detect than uncertainty or disbelief. Positive entailment was easier than negative entailment. Only entailment influenced syllogistic reasoning with unless harder than the positively entailed conjunctions. At each age linguistic comprehension of negative entailment was related to understanding valid implications in unless syllogisms. The relation between comprehension of pragmatic uncertainty and detection of uncertain conclusions in reasoning increased with age.

Interface Delay is a theory of syntactic development, which attempts to explain an array of constructions that are slow to develop, which are characterized by being sensitive to discourse-pragmatic considerations of the type associated with the natural semantic class of definites. The theory claims that neither syntax itself, nor the discourse-pragmatic abilities related to executive function and theory of mind themselves are slow to develop. Rather, the claim is that the nexus or interface between the two cognitive domains is slow to develop. We review the development of subjects in child Spanish as an example of this delayed growth trajectory. Further, we review evidence that a delay in the development of tense causes concomitant delays in the seemingly unrelated phenomena of non-nominative case subject pronoun use and un-inverted wh- questions.

Multiple approaches – including observational and experimental – are necessary to articulate powerful theories of learning. Our field’s key questions, which rely on these varied methods, are still open. How do children perceive and produce language? What do they encounter in their linguistic input? What does the learner bring to the task of acquisition? Considerable progress has been made for the development of spoken English (especially by North American learners). Yet there is still a great deal to discover about how children in other populations proceed, especially populations in rural settings. To examine language learning in these populations, we need a multi-method approach. However, adapting and integrating methods, particularly experimental ones, to new settings can present immense challenges. In this paper, we discuss the opportunities and challenges facing researchers who aim to use a multimethodological approach in rural samples, and what the field of language acquisition can do to promote such work.

It is well known that mothers give their infants lessons in conversational competence from an early age. This study considered how maternal gestures and prosody contribute to this developing competence. It examines how mothers use ostensive marking to point out common references at different stages of development. The corpus consisted of longitudinal observations of four mother–infant dyads during free play (infants aged 0;4 to 1;1), at three stages of sensorimotor development (III, IV and V). Four dimensions of ostensive marking were considered: (1) the span of the marked utterance (holistic vs. local); (2) the communication channel used (gestural vs. prosodic); (3) the type of gestural marker (oriented, iconic, conventional, beats); and (4) the type of prosodic marker (emphasis, prosodic cliché, reinforced nuclear stress, focal accent). Although there was no clear change in the patterns of specific types of gestural or prosodic markers, the results showed that mothers adapt their gestures to the infant's processing level. Between stages III and V, they move from holistic to local and from gestural to prosodic marking. Stage IV appears to be an excellent period for observing the transition.

The gender and number of a direct object clitic pronoun are based on the gender and number of the noun to which it refers. Grammatical gender is an intrinsic property of the lexical item that is independent from the natural sex of referents, whereas number is a non-intrinsic feature of nouns based on the conceptual level of quantity. The aim of this paper is to investigate children's ability in matching Italian direct object clitic pronouns to an inanimate visual referent on the basis of number or gender information. The dependent variables are accuracy and response time. A total of sixty-nine children aged from 4;6 to 7;5 participated. The results show that children are more accurate and faster in selecting the referent when they use number information compared to the condition in which this matching operation is led by gender.

Within the first year of life, infants learn to segment words from fluent speech. Previous research has shown that infants at 0;7·5 can segment consonant-initial words, yet the ability to segment vowel-initial words does not emerge until the age of 1;1–1;4 (0;11 in some restricted cases). In five experiments, we show that infants aged 0;11 but not 0;8 are able to segment vowel-initial words that immediately follow the function word the [ði], while ruling out a bottom-up, phonotactic account of these results. Thus, function words facilitate the segmentation of vowel-initial words that appear sentence-medially for infants aged 0;11.

Japanese infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) were compared on their segmental distributions and consonant-vowel association patterns. Consistent with findings in other languages, a higher ratio of segments that are generally produced early was found in IDS compared to ADS: more labial consonants and low-central vowels, but fewer fricatives. Consonant-vowel associations also favored the early produced labial-central, coronal-front, coronal-central, and dorsal-back patterns. On the other hand, clear language-specific patterns included a higher frequency of dorsals, affricates, geminates, and moraic nasals in IDS. These segments are frequent in adult Japanese, but not in the early productions or the IDS of other studied languages. In combination with previous results, the current study suggests that both fine-tuning (an increased use of early produced segments) and highlighting (an increased use of language-specifically relevant segments) might modify IDS on the segmental level.

Two common and seemingly independent error patterns, namely CONSONANT HARMONY and GLIDING, are examined for their typological characteristics based on cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from young children's developing phonologies. Data are drawn from the published literature and from the developmental phonology archives at Indiana University. An asymmetry is observed such that the occurrence of harmony is found to imply the occurrence of gliding, but not vice versa. While this finding would be unexpected within contemporary derivational theories, it can be shown to follow within optimality theory from a fixed universal ranking relationship among certain constraints. Optimality theory is also argued to offer a viable developmental account with clinical implications that can serve as a further test of the theory.

The effects of five factors on the sensitivity of 36 women to infant cries were studied. The variables were listener experience (none, one month, four months), age of crying infant (one month, four months), type of cry (tired, angry, hungry), cry typicality (prototypical, moderately typical) and cry length (fixed, variable). A five-way analysis of variance was performed after scores were converted to the signal detection measure of sensitivity, d′. In addition to several main effects, significant age of infant × typicality × cry type, typicality × listener experience, and typicality × cry length interactions were found. The finding of an influence of cry length provided a possible explanation for the discrepancy in results in the infant cry literature, since the better discriminated single cries of variable length were typical of those cry signals used in studies reporting successful discrimination, and the poorly discriminated 15 sec fixed-length cry sequences were typical of those used in the studies failing to find discrimination of infant cries.

In a replication and extension of a study on the pronoun it by Chipman & de Dardel, 61 children aged 3; 1–5; 2 were asked to carry out instructions of the form ‘There is playdough on the table. Give it to me’. They were also asked ‘Give me some’, and ‘Give me the playdough’. The results indicate that children do observe the distinction between definite and indefinite pronouns as it applies to quantity, from the youngest age studied. It is also argued that to the extent that children fail to fully comprehend the implications of using the definite pronoun, their failure applies to definite reference in general, and not the pronoun in particular.

The development of the forms and functions of interrogatives in parent-child interaction in the early stages of language acquisition is discussed with illustrative examples from data relating to two Tamil-speaking children and their parents. The analysis of the data reveals that children first acquire and use intonation questions followed by enga ‘where’, enna ‘what’ and yaari ‘who’. Yes/no questions using the interrogative marker -aa are acquired in the next stage when the children are able to use verb endings. Similarly question words that take case markers are acquired in the next stage. It is emphasized that interrogatives serve a multiplicity of communicative functions and are not restricted to the information-seeking role. Children, when they begin to use interrogatives, model their usage of them on the adult behaviour patterns to which they have been exposed, both in terms of form and function.

This paper explores two Mandarin-speaking children's (3;2 and 3;3) ability to refer to the past in mother–child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. The results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. It is suggested that maternal scaffolding functions as a discourse support for children to participate in conversation involving earlier past. When establishing past reference with overt temporal markers, the children resort mainly to aspect markers. In addition, they also rely on semantic and discourse-pragmatic resources for temporal inferencing, such as inherent semantic aspect, shared background knowledge and situational context.

This study explored responsive and linguistic parent input features during parent-child interactions and investigated how four input categories related to children’s production of diverse, simple sentences. Of primary interest was parent use of responsive, simple declarative input sentences. Responsive and linguistic features of parent input to 20 typically developing toddlers at 1;9 were coded during play in a laboratory playroom, then classified into four input categories: responsive, declarative, responsive declarative, and neither responsive nor simple declarative. The percentage of each input category was related to child sentence diversity at 2;6 using Spearman correlations. Parent use of responsive declarative and declarative utterances were both rare. Responsive input was positively correlated with child sentence diversity, and the neither category was negatively correlated with child sentence diversity. The findings provide new support for the importance of balanced conversational turns. Implications for defining both how input is delivered and its linguistic content are discussed.

This study tested infants’ ability to segregate target speech from a background of ecologically valid multi-talker speech at a 10 dB SNR. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure, 72 English-learning 5-, 9-, and 12-month-old monolinguals were tested on their ability to detect and perceive their own name. At all three ages infants were able to detect the presence of the target speech, but only at 9 months did they show sensitivity to the phonetic details that distinguished their own name from other names. These results extend previous findings on infants’ speech perception in noise to more naturalistic forms of background speech.

We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues compared to other languages, and children have been argued to acquire semantic and phonological rules in tandem. German–Russian bilingual children face the challenge of acquiring two different gender assignment systems simultaneously. We tested 45 bilingual children (ages 4–10 years) and monolingual controls. Results show that the children are clearly sensitive to phonological cues, while semantic cues play a minor role. However, monolingual and bilingual children have different defaulting strategies, with monolinguals defaulting to neuter and bilinguals to feminine gender.