Data from 996 Italian-speaking children were collected and analyzed to assess whether a movement-based notion of grammatical complexity is adequate to capture the developmental trend of clitics and passives in Italian. A second goal of the study was to address the relationship between working memory and syntactic development, exploring the hypothesis that higher digit span values predict better comprehension of complex matrix sentences. The results confirm the validity of a ranking of grammatical structures based on constituent movement, with both clitics and passives developing in parallel and later than canonical SVO sentences. Working memory also shows an effect on sentence comprehension in general, but standard measures (digit span forward/backward) do not show a selective advantage in handling complex constructions such as clitics and passives.

As written language contains more complex syntax than spoken language, exposure to written language provides opportunities for children to experience language input different from everyday speech. We investigated the distribution and nature of relative clauses in three large developmental corpora: one of child-directed speech (targeted at pre-schoolers) and two of text written for children – namely, picture books targeted at pre-schoolers for shared reading and children’s own reading books. Relative clauses were more common in both types of book language. Within text, relative clause usage increased with intended age, and was more frequent in nonfiction than fiction. The types of relative clause structures in text co-occurred with specific lexical properties, such as noun animacy and pronoun use. Book language provides unique access to grammar not easily encountered in speech. This has implications for the distributional lexical-syntactic features and associated discourse functions that children experience and, from this, consequences for language development.

Bilingual children may choose to reply to utterances in one language with another language. This behavior, which we call interspeaker code-switching, reportedly varies in frequency across children yet the sources of such variation are not well understood. While its use has been linked to variation in proficiency both concurrently and longitudinally, quantitative analyses of this relationship are limited. Here we measure frequency of interspeaker code-switching in a new population, French–English bilinguals in France (ages 5–8), using parental report and relate it to children’s self-reported language attitudes and perceptions of dominance, English receptive and expressive vocabulary, and sentence repetition ability. These children use interspeaker code-switching infrequently and nearly exclusively in the direction of French. Use is predicted by children’s expressive lexical and grammatical proficiency but not their attitudes toward English and French and exhibits only a marginally significant relationship with self-reported dominance. It shows a closer relationship with proficiency than other more well studied experience variables such as current exposure and output, especially for children with lesser English use. These results support a strong link between interspeaker code-switching and proficiency but not for children’s attitudes in a context where they are generally favorable.

Sentence repetition tasks have been widely used in the last years as a diagnostic tool in developmental language disorders. However in Spanish there are few (if any) of these instruments, especially for younger children. In this context, we develop a new Sentence Repetition Task for assessing language (morphosyntactic) abilities of very young Spanish children. A list of 33 sentences of different length and complexity was created and included in the task. A total of 130 typical developing children from 2 to 4 years of age were engaged in a play situation and asked to repeat the sentences. Children’s answers were scored for accuracy at sentence and word level and error analysis at the word level was undertaken. Besides a subsample of 92 children completed a non-word repetition task. First results show its adequacy to children from 2 to 4 years of age, its capacity to discriminate between different developmental levels, and its concurrent validity with the nonword repetition task.