Child Language Acqusition Research Papers (original) (raw)

The quantifier dou (roughly corresponding to English 'all') in Mandarin Chinese has been the topic of much discussion in the theoretical literature. This study investigated children's knowledge of this quantifier using a new methodological technique, which we dubbed the Question-Statement Task. Three questions were addressed: (i) whether young Mandarin-speaking children know that dou is a universal quantifier that quantifies over the elements to its left, (ii) whether they know that dou is an adverb of quantification (Q-adverb) which can (unselectively) bind any variable in its domain, and (iii) whether they know that dou can quantify over wh-words. The main finding was that, by age four, Mandarin-speaking children have the relevant knowledge. The results reflect the early availability of adult-like linguistic knowledge of dou-quantification.

- by
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- Semantics, Syntax-Semantics Interface, Child Language Acqusition, Mandarin Chinese

The aim of this study is to provide normative data regarding the acquisition of the phoneme /r/ in normally developing children. A total of 60 children between 3-5 years participated in this research from Gaziantep province, Turkey. 15 different words including the phoneme /r/ as word-initial, word-medial and word-final were selected. A picture-naming procedure was applied in order to elicit speech from children. Findings suggest that until the age of 4, children do not produce 50% of customary production level. However, it is found that 5-year old children also do not reach 75% of acquisition, which is inconsistent with the current findings from normative studies in Turkey.

The account of lexical, overt subjects in pro-drop languages like Italian and Spanish has commanded a great deal of attention in work spanning almost three decades, and at present remains the object of painstaking research. In languages like Spanish, which display a much less rigid word order than highly configurational languages like English, the subject can appear in different positions. The well-documented-but not fully understood-Spanish facts have resulted in a plethora of competing analyses in the literature. In a nutshell, the main debate has revolved around the question of whether subjects in Spanish are located in the specifier of IP/TP, as standardly assumed for English, or whether they are Ā-constituents occupying a position outside of the inflectional layer.

- by Julio Villa-García and +1
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- Child Language Acqusition

APA Citation: İnci Kavak, V.(2019). The acquisition and use of negation in the early child language. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 15(2), 587-604. Abstract This paper investigates how negation develops in the speech of a Turkish-speaking child in the very early stages of language acquisition. The study features the video recordings of a child between the ages of 19 and 22 months and the analyses of negative forms in the recorded data. The development of negation in parent-child interactions is discussed with demonstrative examples between the boy and his parents. The data was recorded by the mother in a regular fashion, particularly at play and lunch times. For the detailed data analysis, the recordings have been divided into three sets according to the age of the child as 1;8, 1;9 and 1;10. The initial step is to identify and explain how negation is formed in Turkish, which is followed by the data analysis in order to track the development of negation in the child's speech. The ways in which his formation of negation improves have been given special attention and interpreted as the child's linguistic knowledge expands. The data evidences that the child not only starts to use most forms of negation as early as the age of 1;10, but also does this strategically by performing them for a successful communication in a clear developmental sequence. Some of his strategies traced in the data are using variety sets, complementing one negative form with the other to emphasize his point and providing reasons and results for his statements. The findings confirm that the child acquires the forms in an order from more independent to the dependent as well as in a sequence from the easy to the linguistically and cognitively more challenging.

In natural language, we encounter various sentence types that, under certain circumstances, are evaluated as neither true nor false. For instance, it is intuitively difficult to assess the truth value of a sentence whose presupposition is not satisfied in the context. A common theoretical approach is to characterize the status of such sentences with a third value of one kind or another. In this chapter, we consider children’s acquisition of four linguistic phenomena that can give rise to 'gappy' judgments that correspond neither to True nor False: scalar implicature, presupposition, homogeneity, and vagueness. We discuss how young children's interpretations of such sentences can provide insight into how these phenomena should be treated within semantic theories.

- by Lyn Tieu and +4
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- Developmental Psychology, Language Acquisition, Pragmatics, Semantics

We investigated the word order preferences of Tagalog-speaking adults and five-and seven-year-old children. The participants were asked to complete sentences to describe pictures depicting actions between two animate entities. Adults preferred agent-initial constructions in the patient voice but not in the agent voice, while the children produced mainly agent-initial constructions regardless of voice. This agent-initial preference, despite the lack of a close link between the agent and the subject in Tagalog, shows that this word order preference is not merely syntactically-driven (subject-initial preference). Additionally, the children's agent-initial preference in the agent voice, contrary to the adults' lack of preference, shows that children do not respect the subject-last principle of ordering Tagalog full noun phrases. These results suggest that language-specific optional features like a subject-last principle takes longer to be acquired.

- by Rowena Garcia
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- Word order, Child Language Acqusition, Voice, Sentence Production

Galasso 2011 discusses the fundamental syntactic notion of movement linking the rate of grammatical development to production rates of morphosyntactic inflection. • Galasso, Joseph. 2011. Children first start with a single processing model-"Merge," then move to a dual processing model-"Move". This study has been influential in capturing how the theoretical notion of syntactic movement influences child language development of possessives. The findings add to previous postulations that production rates of morphosyntactic inflection are optionally variable by further contending that children go through an initial stage characterized by complete lack of access to inflectional morphology.

Günümüzde daha pek çok çalışmayı gerektiren dilbilim ve psikoloji alanına giren sorunlar, dil edinimi ile ilgili çalışmalardan gelecek verilerle aydınlanma bulmakta ve ortaya çıkan bilgi ise bir takım soruları beraberinde getirmektedir. Kavram mı yoksa sözcük mü önce edinilir? Dil gelişimi ile birlikte öğrenilen yeni kavramların zihinde örgütlenmesi, nasıl bir düzeni takip eder? Bu soruları merkezinde bulunduran Öntür Kuramı, ulamın dereceli bir içyapısı olduğunu öne sürerek ulam öğelerinin, bulunduğu ulamı en iyi temsil eden öğeler etrafında odaklandığını savunmaktadır. Dereceli bir üyelik söz konusu olunca, zihinden çağrılma ve kavranma zorluğu üzerinde kavramın öntürlüğü etkili olmaktadır. İşte bu çalışma, deyimlerin bileşen adlarının öntürlüğü ve deyimin anlamlandırılması arasında bir koşutluğun olup olmadığını sorgulamaktadır. Araştırma grubu, anasınıfı, 3. sınıf, 5. sınıf ve 8. sınıflardan çocukları kapsamakta olup ilk uygulamada BEDEN BÖLÜMÜ üst ulamına ait kavramların bu yaşlara göre öntürlük değerleri sormaca yöntemiyle belirlenmiştir. Ortaya çıkan verilerden yola çıkarak seçilen kavram adlarını bileşeni olarak bulunduran ad + eylem yapısındaki deyimler, ad bileşeninin öntürlüğüne göre derecelendirilmiş ve her biri bir öykünün sonuç tümcesi olarak verilmiştir. Deyimlerin ya değişmeceli ya da gerçek anlamlarını yansıtan ya da konu dışı olan resimler hazırlanarak, bir kavrama testi oluşturulmuştur. Çocuk katılımcılar, öyküleri dinleyip sonundaki deyimi duydukları anda, öyküden anladıklarına dayalı olarak resimlerden birisini seçmişlerdir. Verilen yanıtların doğruluğu ve tepki süresi dikkate alınarak, deyimlerin anlamlandırılmasında bir öntürlük etkisi olup olmadığına yönelik çözümleme yapılmıştır. Anasınıfı grubu, ağırlıklı olarak gerçek anlamı seçmiş olup, diğer gruplarda ise ilerleyen yaşla birlikte değişmeceli anlama bir yönelim gözlenmiştir. Deyimlerin anlamlandırılmasında öntürlük etkisinden bahsetmeyi mümkün kılan bu bulgular, deyimlerin kalıplaşmış ve tek parça sözcükler olduğunu dolayısıyla bileşen sözcüklerin deyimin değişmeceli anlamı üzerinde bir etkisi olmadığını öne süren varsayımlara karşıt veri niteliğindedir. Diğer bir deyişle, deyimlerin anlamlandırılmasında, değişmeceli anlama erişildiği durumda bile gerçek anlama bir şekilde erişim sağlandığına dair, alanda yaygın çalışılmış tanınırlık ve saydamlık kriterlerinden farklı olarak, öntürlük kriteriyle kanıt sunulmuştur.

- by Huseyin Uysal
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- Cultural Studies, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

This paper presents a longitudinal study of a four-year-old child's development of the interactional practices to negotiate requests when immediate granting from the parents was not given. While many studies have focused on the development of requesting abilities by children and some have shed light on their request negotiation practices, little is currently known about how children develop the interactional practices to pursue requests in extended discourse. Using conversation analysis to track a child's request negotiation practices for twelve months, we demonstrate that over time, the child learned to occasion, formulate, and reformulate requests in ways that exhibited increased sensitivity to the recipient and the sequential context as well as to his own entitlement and the request's contingency. The findings contribute to research on child language socialization by highlighting the active role children may play in co-constructing interaction and thus shaping the trajectory of socialization.

This research makes an attempt through a case study and the use of previous studies to the test hypotheses of prominent researchers (e.g.: Francois Grosjean, Ellen Bialystok, Jürgen Meisel) and show that bilingual development depends on environmental influence as much as on the children’s individual aptitude and general intelligence. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents the controversial theories on bilingual children’s language development, based on previous research, and makes a comparison between bilingual and monolingual children’s language development. The second part is going to carry out the case study, focusing on eight bilingual children’s (between the age of 4 and 11) language development process, and more closely on three of the most common assumptions:
1. Bilingual children start speaking later than monolingual children.
2. Bilingual children are equally proficient in their languages.
3. Code-switching is caused by bilingual children’s inability to distinguish their languages.

Acquisition of Possessives by Elena Babatsouli 26 MAY 2022 DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199772810-0292... more

In order to meet their needs and perceptions, the children's early words have their origin Mama and Papa are acquired by German-born preschool children, who are commuting between Iraq and Germany. The study will be primarly contrastive in nature and focuses mainly on the characteristics of these parental terms in two different language communities. Furthermore, light will also have to be shed on this less researched and discussed issue by touching upon the learning challenges and difficulties of the kinship terms in Iraqi-Arabic and how could they be overcome. The data come from the author's daily observation of his German-born children, a four-years-old daughter, and a boy, who is three years old. In order to supplement and enrich the study, I conducted interviews with parents and their children that I personally know.

- by Qasim Hassan
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- Dialectology, Children and Families, Kinship (Anthropology), Child Development

This chapter provides readers with an overview of analyses of traditional and contemporary work on language use in African American communities in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language (OHAAL). This introduction provides a justification for the need to provide a variety of scholarly perspectives on African American Language (AAL) with respect to sociohistorical origins and perspectives, regional variation, structure and description, child language acquisition and development, education and pedagogy, social and cultural contexts, attitudes and beliefs, and identity. In addition, this Introduction serves to provide a discussion on clarity and specificity in discussions about naming and defining AAL (or African American English) as well as about what it is and is not. Finally, this Introduction serves to highlight a need for collaborative perspectives and innovative thinking while reasserting the need for better research and communication on AAL within and outside the linguistic community in general and sociolinguistics in particular.

- by Sonja Lanehart
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- Sociolinguistics, Linguistics, Child Language Acqusition, Identity

This article describes the case of a child named Tabetha, who acquired classical Syriac as a spoken language natively, beginning with a description of her sociolinguistic environment, and the challenges met in raising Tabetha as a... more

3.1 Introduction One of the leading questions burning in the minds of most developmental linguists is: To what extent do biological factors—such as a child's maturing brain—play a role in the early stages of syntactic development? In developing this question, I take as our point of departure the view that the Chomskyan Minimalist Program (MP) is uniquely designed amongst serious contemporary theories to deliver such a language-to-biology basis. Specifically, I shall examine and extend the Program's hypothesis of 'Merge over Move' (MoM) in such a way that it not only delivers language to biology, but that in so doing we set out to establish a mechanism that can account for known syntactic deficits found in early child language. The MoM hypothesis will concern aspects of locality of movement whereby the 'distance of feature(s) traveled'—namely, local vs. distant movement—closely maps onto distinctions defining semantic vs. syntactic projections (respectively). One such central claim leaning towards a language-to-biology corollary has come from studies which look to language modeling and to see if there is any psycholinguistic evidence for decomposition at the lexical level (language) since decomposition, particularly of stem & affix, would have to be the result of a movement/displacement operation which triggers activity in specific cortical regions of the brain (biology). For instance, the classic debate between how words get stored in the mental lexicon requires a theoretical description which either: (1) a. views all complex* ©words to be stored as either undecomposed units (showing no intra-word movement/displacement, and where a single brain region would be activated), or conversely… b. which views all ©words to be forcibly broken and parceled out into constituents (always showing intra-word movement, and where dual regions would always be simultaneously activated), or, (2) views only some ©words to be stored as lexical units containing their base (undecomposed, hence no movement, one brain region) while considered productive affixes come decomposed and are not related as part of the lexical look-up and retrieval mechanism (movement, another brain region). (* Complex (©words) here would mean the word would at least need to be more than

- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition, The Minimalist Program

This book is an extensive revision of my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the University of Essex in 1999. While the arguments presented herein are identical to those of the dissertation—namely, arguments which lend themselves to more... more

- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition

Pakistan is a linguistically rich nation where seventy two languages are spoken. Language research shows that children should learn as many languages as possible, which increases the grey matter of the brain and makes them more intelligent. However, it is impossible to teach all languages of Pakistan by including them in the National Curriculum. By virtue of the Constitution of Pakistan, Urdu and English are the national languages. Recently, in September 2015, the Supreme Court passed a ruling by which Urdu also became the official language of Pakistan. In this regard, a focus should be placed in making children bilingual in at least these two languages, goal not achieved until now. Besides, so that the provincial language legacy does not get lost, an effort should be made to ensure the teaching of the provincial languages (Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Balochi at least) at primary and secondary schools in all the schools of the country, public or private. This research is a proposal based on a previously empirically tested linguistic model. The main purpose is to achieve bilingual citizens (if not multilingual) who are able to speak the national languages, as well as their provincial languages, at a native level and be proficient in speaking, listening, reading and writing, in order to ensure continuity of the rich linguistic legacy of the most important languages of Pakistan.

Learning and talking about their own possessions and the possessions of their peers and caretakers plays a central role in children’s daily life. It is unsurprising then that relationships between possessors and their possessions are amongst the first relationships that children encode when they start to
string words together (see e.g. Brown 1973); and it is no wonder that many psycholinguists have made use of this rich data source to address questions about the mechanisms that drive children’s linguistic development.
However, most of the available studies of the acquisition of possessive constructions that we will discuss have investigated only one or two possession-encoding constructions in an individual language. Moreover, the focus
has typically not been on the encoding of the possessive relation itself, but on other aspects of the respective possessive construction. For instance, possessive -s markers in German and English (e.g. Susi-s Huhn ‘Sue’s chicken’) were analysed in studies that investigated whether the syntactic
categories of the target language were already present in early child grammars (e.g. Eisenbeiß 2000; Marinis 2002, 2003; Radford 1990). In these studies, possessive markers were simply treated as morpho-syntactic realisations
of syntactic categories; and semantic aspects were largely ignored. Similarly, possessive constructions with two-place verbs like "have" and "belong" were investigated in studies of the acquisition of syntax-semantic mappings, but these constructions were just treated as one type of twoargument
construction and not compared to other constructions encoding
possession (see e.g. Bowerman 1990, Pinker 1984). To our knowledge, no study has yet provided a comprehensive cross-linguistic overview that focuses on the different ways in which possessive relationships are encoded linguistically.
In order to fill this gap, we will provide a cross-linguistic overview of studies of children’s acquisition of the constructions that their target language employs to encode possession. In addition, we will present new data from German child language and child-directed speech, and discuss the implications for theoretical linguistics and language acquisition research. Our focus will be on three ways of encoding relationships between PRs and possessed entities (see Heine 1997; Baron, Herslund and Sørensen 2001 for
overviews):
– adnominal possession: Both Possessor (PR) and Possessum (PM) are
encoded within the same noun phrase (e.g. my/daddy’s chickens, the
chickens of our neighbours, …);
– predicative possession: The possessive relationship is encoded by a twoplace
predicate such as have, own or belong or by be (e.g. I have a dog.
The dog belongs to me. This dog is mine);
– “external possession”: the PR and the PM are realised as arguments of
a verb whose lexical meaning does not involve the notion of possession
(e.g. I tapped him-PR on the shoulder-PM).
We will first show how studies of children’s possession constructions can help us to evaluate models of children’s linguistic development. Against this background, we will present studies of the acquisition of adnominal, predicative and external possession constructions (EPCs). For each of these construction types, we will provide a brief overview of possession constructions in adult German and contrast them with possessive constructions in other languages for which acquisition studies are available. This will allow us to discuss empirical findings from earlier studies and our own analysis of German child data. Finally, we will compare the development of the three types of possession constructions and discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical linguistics and models of children’s linguistic development. In particular, we will show how the available empirical findings about the acquisition of possession constructions can be captured in
approaches that try to integrate core insights from current generative and usage-based approaches.

1.1 Introduction I can't think of any other sort of software (the 'computer-program' metaphor for the computational design of the human mind) which would require its hardware (the human brain) to establish a meaningful algorithm which makes use of movement at a distance, thus preferring abstract structural closeness over physical adjacent closeness—whereby an essential aspect of the operating system relies on rules of structure dependency. This preference widely differs with what we find amongst formal, non-human language designs. Hence, such a selective choice being 'biology-driven' must somehow be recognized as 'biologically optimal in design' in order to satisfy displacement properties exclusively found in natural language. This monograph is essentially about such an operating system of language design. The Fibonacci code The very idea that the way humans string words together may have ancestral links to spiral formations found in shellfish is nothing short of stunning. Yet, the 'golden ratio' of Fibonacci 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34… etc.… holds for our language design. (If you prefer to read the ratio as a binary rule: then [0 = 1], [1= 0, 1]). (Merge (add) first two numbers (adjacent) of the sequence to get the third number…and keep going: 1+1=2, 2+1= 3, 3+2= 5, 5+3 =8, 8+5=13…). From physical-adjacent merge, we get abstract structure: (0) 'Fibonacci Spiral Formation' (like shellfish , snails).

- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition, The Minimalist Program

This dissertation examines the acquisition of a phenomenon that lies at the interface of logic and grammar. Polarity-sensitive items (PSIs), including negative polarity items (NPIs) such as English 'any', are often characterized by their restricted distribution, and analyzed in terms of their licensing condition (compare 'John doesn’t have any books', where 'any' is licensed by negation, with the unlicensed *'John has any books'). 'Any' moreover oscillates between NPI uses and so-called ‘free choice’ uses ('John may choose any book'). While a small handful of previous acquisition studies on English 'any' have targeted children’s knowledge of the licensing condition, no previous study has systematically investigated children’s knowledge of the complex underlying semantics of PSIs like 'any', let alone the question of how children are to reconcile the dual nature of 'any'. The series of studies in this dissertation presents novel evidence from experiments and corpora demonstrating that children have incredibly sophisticated semantic knowledge of 'any', which includes the ability to generate subdomain alternatives, to (pre-)exhaustify these alternatives, to perform domain widening, and to compute so-called free choice inferences. Yet samples of parental spontaneous production reveal very little evidence that could inform the learner as to how to carry out the semantic operations required for adult-like interpretation of 'any'. I propose that the solution to this learning problem lies in innately constraining the hypothesis space of PSI types. Such a restricted hypothesis space is available to us in the form of a generative typology put forth in Chierchia (2013), an analysis that derives the possible classes of PSIs on the basis of free variation along two dimensions: the kind of alternatives that the target PSI activates, and the mode of exhaustification that factors the alternatives into meaning. On the assumption that these two dimensions are innately specified, only a finite set of PSI types can be generated; I discuss how the learner might use 'any'’s unique distributional properties in the input to map the string 'any' to the target PSI within the typology of restricted options.

- by Lyn Tieu
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- Developmental Psychology, Language Acquisition, Pragmatics, Semantics

Page 1. Children's Passives: The Role of Discourse Features William Snyder, University of Connecticut (with Nina Hyams, UCLA) UConn Psycholinguistics Brownbag, 6 September 2008 1. The Derivational Approach to Passives (1) The British sank fourteen battleships in the winter of 1941. Demotion of the logical subject: (2) There were sunk (by the British) fourteen battleships in the winter of 1941.

- by Nina Hyams and +1
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- Child Language Acqusition

This article reports on a study exploring the differential effects of immediate and delayed corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of the English past tense. One hundred and forty-five seventh-grade EFL learners were assigned to four groups: Immediate CF, Delayed CF, Task Only, and Control. Each experimental group performed six focused communicative tasks, two each in three treatment sessions, eliciting the use of the English past tense. The Immediate CF group received feedback on their erroneous use of the target structure in the first session, the Delayed CF group received feedback in the final session, and the Task Only group performed the communicative tasks without receiving any feedback. The Control group only took the achievement tests. The effects of the feedback treatments were measured through an untimed grammaticality judgment test and an elicited imitation test. Mixed-effects analyses examining the influence of both fixed and random factors demonstrated that immediate CF was more facilitative of L2 development than delayed CF. The results suggest the importance of addressing linguistic errors before they are proceduralized in the interlanguage.

- by Shaofeng Li and +1
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- Second Language Acquisition, TESOL, Applied Linguistics, Teaching English As A Foreign Language
- by Evangelia Daskalaki and +1
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- Child Language Acqusition, Bilingualism, Heritage Languages, Greek Syntax

It is often asserted that young children's word learning is guided by constraints or internal biases. Constraints are broadly described as “any factor that favors some possibilities over others” (Medin et al., 1990). Researchers have argued that specialized lexical constraints cause children to make some inferences about word meanings before others. An analysis shows that the concept constraint is not informative because it does not differentiate a circumscribed set of word learning behaviors. Defining constraints as innate and domain-specific does not remedy this problem. We cannot separate the effects of so-called constraints or biases from a wide range of cognitive and contextual influences on children's inferences about novel word meanings. This conclusion is supported by a selective review of these influences. The summary highlights our need for an explanatory framework that is sufficiently rich to capture the flexibility and diversity of children's word learning. The core of such a framework is summarized as a set of general characteristics of human word learning. These characteristics must serve as a starting point for any viable theory of word learning. Prescriptions for future development of a viable framework are suggested.

5.1 Introduction We take it for granted that child language morphosyntactic development is determined by an emerging internal computational system (what is often called the 'Language Faculty' (LF)). Given this, then by definition, if stages are borne out during which child speech presents immature structures, it becomes incumbent upon the developmental linguist, somehow, to attribute such intermediate stages to a pegged immature computational system. Therefore, as I see it, the task of any sound child syntactic theory is to restrict the computational work-space available for the developing child, in any one stage of development, in ways which fit the child's speech production. Specific to merge, we cite that it is not just one operation, but rather a family of operations—where the type of merge which gets employed is often dependent upon the nature and maturational complexity of the given operation. Merge therefore may follow a gradient typology in its own right, and when issues of maturation come up, an eye on the type of merge that gets employed (child language) becomes a central concern. We also argue that there is a more general developmental (maturational-based) sequence of 'Merge over Move'. This broad sequence also seems to map onto a +/-gradient productivity cline whereby Derivational morphology sides with Merge and Inflectional morphology sides with Move. So, we have a two-prong hypothesis at work: (i) Merge in its narrow scope (developmental ontogeny—as determined by the type of merge employed given the nature and complexity) and (ii) Merge over Move in its broad scope (developmental phylogeny—as based on broad selective typologies/parameters of a given language). 5.2 Movement Applications Movement has recently been defined within MP as a form of merge. But there is not just one type of merge. Rather, merge makes-up a family of distinct movement operations, with their defining aspects being delimited, for the most part, by two crucial factors: (i) Locality of movement (local intra-phrasal vs. distant inter-phrasal), and (ii) Nature of Scope (semantic vs. syntactic). When merge is said to employ the former kind (local/semantic scope), it is said to be external merge. When merge is said to employ the latter (distant/syntactic), it is said to be internal merge (= move). The following section sketches as an overview the two-prong distinction.

- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition, The Minimalist Program

This paper describes a coding scheme and a set of semi-automatic procedures for the annotation of complex noun phrases and their morpho-syntactic properties in child language data. These tools are based on the CHAT conventions of the Child Language Data Exchange System (MacWhinney 2000; CHILDES: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/; CHAT: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/manuals/chat.pdf). The coding scheme presented here focuses on the order and grammatical category of the individual elements in the noun phrase and their gender, number and case marking. It also provides information about the category and lexical identity of the element that assigns case to the respective noun phrase (e.g. the dative preposition mit ‘with’). The coding scheme was developed for German child language, but it can be adapted to other languages and populations.

- by Sonja Eisenbeiss
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- Languages, Computer Science, Languages and Linguistics, Research Methodology

Theories of child language development attempted to account for the development of language in infants from various angles, and with different points of emphasis. In this article, two major theories are discussed with regards to their major contribution to this area of study, Piaget’s cognitivist theory and Vygotsky’s social interactivist theory. Both theories agree that the sensorimotor period in infant’s development is marked by an organization of means and ends. However, the two theories diverge in many aspects of child language development, the most basic of which is their views on the interrelationship between cognitive, linguistic and social processes of development.

The entire premise of this monograph rests upon a singular 'linguistic statement'— 'That very young children lack syntactic movement'. Now, if this statement were uncontroversial, we could pack-up right here and go home—I'd leave you with a fair amount of publications and references which would lead back not only to the validity of the statement, but which would offer us an abundance of means in showing how it could be no other way. However, our current living is not so easy. Still, there are plenty of developmental linguists—both inside and outside the Chomskyan framework—who would quickly reject such a linguistic statement. I am reminded of clarion calls (present and past) announcing that the child and adult are linguistically of the same mind (Continuity), and where merely the 'spell-out' (not tethered to the underlying grammar) of full specificity of features gets undermined by the child—viz., the deficits leading to child grammars are largely dismissed, naively, as performance in nature, nothing more. Or, the notion that, at the very worst, the child may simply be found as fluctuating between that of a child state and a fully-fledged target state (a kind of Optionality, or Optional Stage), also an account directed towards superficial performance and not deeper competency. What we would rather suggest, and some theories approach this hypothesis—e.g., proponents of Optionality Theory (OT) suggest this, though they shy away from a pure deficit of movement analysis—is that it is an exclusive lack of movement having to do with such feature spell-out that results in discontinuous grammars. In brief: adult target grammars are capable of handling syntactic movement operations, while very early multi-word child grammars are not. Hence, higher functional projections which host specific features to be checked-off remain vacuous resulting in non-target grammars. For example, one such movement analysis embedded in an OT account is to assume that since all lexical items originate VP-internal, any item unable to move out of the VP thus results in certain underspecification. Recall that subjects as well as all main verbs start out base-generated within VP and must subsequently raise out to higher functional projections in order to check relevant formal features (T, AGR,

- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition, The Minimalist Program

In language change originating within the speech community, child acquisition begins with “faithful transmission of the adult system” (Labov 2007:346). On entering their peer group, children participate in incrementation of change. Input from multiple generations of speakers is arguably necessary for children to advance a language change. With stable variable input, children are reported to acquire their parents’ probabilistic usage, then maintain it among peers. This dissertation asks what can be learned about the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation from a case where children receive limited generational evidence about their community’s linguistic variables. I examine whether these youngest speakers participate in incrementing change, or whether they reinterpret the pre-existing variation. Study participants are six families of immigrants from Puebla in the Philadelphia Mexican community, consisting primarily of a first generation of young adults and a growing second generation of children. Participants themselves recorded day-to-day family interactions, including speech from both caregivers and children. I analyze the acquisition of two variable features: a morphological alternation in the 2nd person singular preterit inflection between standard -aste, -iste and nonstandard -astes, -istes; and frication and deletion of the voiced alveolar flap /ɾ/ in syllable-final position. Addition of non-standard preterit –s is widely reported in other Spanish varieties; change in progress has not been previously observed. Frication of syllable-final /ɾ/ has previously been reported as undergoing change. I find that children use the standard [ɾ] variant of syllable-final /ɾ/ significantly less frequently than their parents. This study also provides the first report of syllable-final /ɾ/ deletion in Central Mexican Spanish, present among both parents and children. Furthermore, the younger generation deletes much more frequently while producing the fricative infrequently or not at all. Children also use the non-standard preterit suffixes significantly more frequently than caregivers, a development that would be atypical of the acquisition of stable variation. I show that even with reduced generational input for the children of this community, they are participating in language change. This study also replicates the finding that both caregiver and peer group influences are detectable in the variable aspects of children’s grammars in the process of language acquisition.

- by Marielle Lerner
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- Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, Immigration, Sociophonetics

Much of the impetus behind our current thinking of syntactic theory has to do with the notion of movement operations—both at the morphological as well as at the syntactic level. The idea developed herein is that movement is no longer just a metaphor as was once used for linguistic theory—just as the syntactic tree is no longer a mere model of syntax—but rather that 'movement up the syntactic tree' has become better understood as bearing a real physiological relevancy regarding how aspects of morphosyntactic displacement get pegged to certain cortical regions of the brain. In other words, linguistic theory has now become biology, and biology is maturational. Hence, the nature of syntactic movement and whether or not it occurs at early stages of child language development has become the central focus which undergirds much of the literature on child syntax, making-up a maturational-based brain-to-language corollary. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at recursive Move [z i , [x, y, z i ]] and its sister operation Merge [x + y = z] and see if the two follow from a biologically-determined maturational timeline, as evidenced by the data. Regarding child language acquisition, theoretical implications follow which demonstrate a Merge over Move account of developmental syntax. Regarding theoretical syntax (as assumed by the Minimalist Program (MP)), implications can be drawn which suggest that the notion of Phase—which had earlier been assumed to cover only vP, CP (Chomsky 2000)—can be extended to any constituency which is 'affected' both at the syntactic and/or semantic levels at transfer by the presence or absence of movement. Thus MOVE defines the phase, as it defines whether or not the string advances up the tree for additional feature checking. The MOVE/Phase Axiom: (a) If movement blocks a constituency from transfer/interpretation, than that constituency is a phase. (Transfer is denoted with the symbol [ /$/ ] placed in front of constituent). (b) Otherwise all stings must transfer as early as possible in the derivation. Whether a string transfers, it not being blocked by movement, than that string is a phase.

- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition, The Minimalist Program

RESUMEN La siguiente investigación tiene como objetivo principal conocer la compren-sión de ciertas estructuras sintácticas complejas en español. Para dicho fin, se trabaja con un sujeto de seis años hablante nativo del dialecto de español de Chile. El experimento se basa en el trabajo de Echeverría (1978) Desarrollo de la comprensión infantil de la sintaxis española. Entre los principales resulta-dos se destaca el hecho de que el su-jeto aún no tiene adquiridas ciertas es-tructuras sintácticas complejas, como, por ejemplo, las oraciones pasivas, que son interpretadas como activas. Los resultados anteriores contradicen la creencia generalizada de que los ni-ños alrededor de los seis años tienen completado su proceso de adquisición lingüística. Palabras Clave: lenguaje, lenguaje in-fantil, adquisición, adquisición sintácti-ca, estructuras complejas. ABSTRACT The main goal of the present investigation is to describe the comprehension of certain complex syntactic structures in Spanish. For this purpose, a study is carried out on a 6-year-old native speaker of Chilean Spanish. The experiment is based on the work by Echeverría (1978) "Desarrollo de la comprensión infantil de la sintaxis española (Deve-lopement of childhood comprehension of Spanish syntax)". Among the main results, it is highlighted that the studied individual has not yet acquired certain complex syntactic structures; for example , passive sentences were interpreted as active ones by the child. These results contradict the general belief that children around 6 years of age have already completed their process of linguistic acquisition.

This study explores children’s acquisition of structured morphosyntactic variation by examining Spanish subject pronoun expression. Analyses of 5,923 verbs produced by 154 Mexican children, ages 6 to 16, show that the variables that most strongly constrain the oldest children’s pronoun usage – Person, Reference, Priming – are acquired first during childhood. These variables exert similar effects across age, with the exception of second-person singular, which favors tú expression among younger children and tú omission among older children. The developmental trajectory from more to less tú expression is explained as the result of (a) increasing production of nonspecific reference, which in turn decreases rates of tú, and (b) abundant reported speech in the younger children’s data, which rendered tú expression pragmatically appropriate.

- by Robert Lannon
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- Child Language Acqusition, Child Language Development
- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition, The Minimalist Program

This qualitative case study investigates six teachers’ use of code-switching (CS) in the Japanese foreign language (JFL) classroom at the Australian National University (ANU). It seeks to find how teachers switch the codes between Japanese and English and what kinds of decisions and opinions are going on when the CS happens. Teachers’ verbal behavior, attitudes and influencing factors will all be surveyed and discussed in this study. Semi-structured interviews and two-round observations provide the first-hand evidence for the investigation while related literatures and policy documents offer some material support. The study recommends that teachers can make use of CS as an educational tool or resource, and the training program for teachers can provide some principles for the use of CS in JFL classroom.

- by 筱筱杨
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- Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Code-Switching, Child Language Acqusition

Languages vary in the ways in which words for conjunction and words for disjunction are interpreted in sentences with negation. To explain the cross-linguistic differences, we propose that words for conjunction and disjunction are interpreted as positive polarity items (PPIs) in some languages (e.g., Mandarin) but not in other languages (e.g., English). If this is correct, then languages should converge on the same intepretations when the polarity sensitivity of conjunction and disjunction is cancelled. One linguistic context that is known to cancel the polarity sensitivity of the English PPI some is in the predicate phrase of sentences with focus operators. We apply this diagnostic to the expressions for disjunction and conjunction in Mandarin and in English. The expectation is that universal principles of semantic interpetation will become operative when conjunction and disjunction words appear in the predicate phrase of focus operators. Since conjunction words and disjunction words are not analyzed as PPIs in this linguistic context, the meaning that is assigned to these words should be the same in all human languages, including child language. By investigating both adult and child English and Mandarin, we show that focus operators do indeed cancel the polarity sensitivity of conjunction words and disjunction words in typologically different languages, and this permits us to witness the invariant logical meanings assigned to these locial connectives in human languages.

- by Peng Zhou (周鹏)
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- Semantics, Child Language Acqusition, Focus particles, Mandarin Chinese
- by joseph galasso
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- Syntax, Child Language Acqusition, The Minimalist Program

Abstract This study examined single-word code-mixing produced by bilingual preschoolers in order to better understand lexical choice patterns in each language. Analysis included item-level code-mixed responses of 606 five-year-old children. Per parent report, children were separated by language dominance based on language exposure and use. Children were assigned to a no-risk or at-risk for language impairment group based on individual performance from an English–Spanish screening battery.

- by Elizabeth D. Peña
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- Code-Switching, Child Language Acqusition

This study investigates how monolingual and sequential bilingual children learn Japanese case-markers which are marked by subject and object respectively in transitive sentence. Specifically, this study explored two questions: (1) Whether or not two-to-five-year-old Japanese monolingual children and six-to-ten-year-old sequential bilingual children are able to comprehend existing subject case-markers (i.e., ga) and object case-markers (i.e., wo), and (2) whether or not Japanese monolingual children and sequential bilingual children utilize argument omitted sentences to learn artificial case-markers po (subject marker) and bi (object marker). We addressed the first question in experiment 1 and 3. Monolingual children (experiment 1) and sequential bilingual children (experiment 3) completed forced-choice discrimination of scenarios after hearing SOV sentences and OSV sentences with either existing subject case-marker ga or object case-marker wo. The results showed that monolingual children acquire case-marker knowledge by four to five years old. For bilingual children, four out of ten participants were unable to understand case-markers correctly. For the second question, in experiment 2 and 4, we investigated how Japanese monolingual children (experiment 2) and sequential bilingual children (experiment 4) utilized argument omitted sentences to learn artificial case-markers po (subject marker) and bi (object marker). In the experiments, the effectiveness of argument-omitted sentences and full-argument sentences on monolingual children’s learning (ages four to seven) of artificial case-markers via short exposure was compared. The ability of bilingual children (ages six to ten) to learn artificial case-markers through exposure to argument-omitted sentences was investigated in experiment 4. In experiment 2, the monolinguals first watched and imitated four single action scenarios while listening to sentences with two non-lexical syllables, po (artificial subject marker) and bi (artificial object marker). Half of the participants learned full-argument sentences, and the others learned argument-omitted sentences. In another test, participants completed forced-choice discrimination of scenarios after hearing sentences with either po or bi. Contrary to experiment 2, bilinguals in experiment 4 were only subjected to argument-omitted sentences. A mixed effect model for children’s responses (correct or incorrect answer) showed that in experiment 2, children who learned case-markers through argument-omitted sentences comprehended OSV sentences well. However, children who learned case-markers through full-argument sentences did not do well in sentence comprehension. Results indicated that argument-dropped exposure, not full-argument exposure, was useful for monolinguals in learning object case-markers. For experiment 4, children who learned case-markers through argument-omitted sentences also comprehended OSV sentences well when compared to chance. Results also showed that both monolinguals and bilinguals seem to pay attention to case-markers when they process argument-dropped sentences since this is the only way to understand a sentence. This study suggests that simpler sentences may work better for learning purposes, specifically for languages with high percentages of argument omission.

- by Zhao Zhao A 趙曌（あきこ） and +1
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- Language Education, Second Language Acquisition, Languages and Linguistics, First Language Acquisition