The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old children use the phonetic, phonological, and morphological information available to process noun plural marking in German (i.e., a very complex system) compared to adults. We expected differences with stem vowels, stem-final consonants or different suffixes, alone or in combination, reflecting different processing of their segmental information. Our results show that for plural processing: 1) a suffix is the most helpful cue, an umlaut the least helpful, and voicing does not play a role; 2) one cue can be sufficient and 3) school-age children have not reached adult-like processing of plural marking.

This article investigates the emergence of recursive DPs in child language. In certain languages, DP modification can be achieved via diverse structures and any number of different embedding markers (prepositions, particles, case-marker, etc.), each having to be learned; this diversity may impact the L1 development of recursive DP modification. Japanese, in contrast, relies on two uniform unrestricted strategies: the adnominal particle の (no) or a relative clause. We report the results of an elicited production study comparing the production of recursive DPs in Japanese-speaking children and adults. Our results show that Japanese children were much like adults in the types of semantic modificational relations that elicited the most target responses. Children were different from adults in that they were: a) much less successful overall, and b) they preferred no, independently of whether the condition was biased toward no. We review the implications of these findings for analyses of no.

This study investigated whether Korean children follow the acquisition pattern predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and the relationship between caretakers’ and children’s speech. Accordingly, we analyzed a Korean corpus (Ryu-Corpus) on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), which comprised longitudinal video-recorded interactions of three Korean children and their caregivers. Results indicate that the children used the past marker -ess principally with telic verbs, consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis. Each child’s usage closely reflects the caretaker’s frequency, yielding a high correlation (τb = 0.79). However, the acquisition of the imperfective marker -ko iss did not show a predicted association with activity verbs, contrary to the Aspect Hypothesis. Furthermore, caretakers’ input did not correlate with the children’s utterances of the imperfective marker (τb = 0.40). We argue that multiple factors such as input frequency, language-specific organization of aspectual semantics, and individual differences should be considered to explain tense-aspect acquisition.

This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive inflection in child-directed speech, the child overwhelmingly produces a possessive construction that circumvents this morphology. This construction, named here the equational possessive strategy (EPS), is largely undescribed in existing literature but is the primary mechanism for the child to express possession. These findings have potential implications for the cross-linguistic acquisition of possessive morphology and the connections between child-directed speech and child language production.

This article explores a defining property of implicit null object constructions, and how this property emerges during the L1 acquisition process. Implicit objects are non-referential and characterized by a strong semantic association between a null N in object position and the contents of the verb root. By means of an elicited production study, we examine children’s sensitivity to this association in terms of the typicality of implicit direct objects and of their use in a potentially contrastive context. Participants were 73 English-speaking children (between the ages of 2;09 and 5;08) and 20 adult controls. Our results show that children make a distinction between implicit objects with typical and atypical objects—even in scenarios where a previous use introduces a potential contrast—but at rates that differ from those of adults. This suggests an incomplete knowledge of the target properties of null objects and indicates that children use a referential null N until later in development, when the selectional link between V and the null object becomes entrenched and hyponymy with the verb root becomes the sole source of recoverability. We draw implications about the co-development of verb meaning and the null object construction.