This article reports on two novel word-learning experiments examining children's use of subject animacy to categorize novel adjectives as either "tough" adjectives (e.g., "easy," "hard") or control adjectives ("afraid," "eager"). In Experiment 1, a group of 4- to 7-year-olds watched videos…

Children acquiring a range of languages have difficulties in the interpretation of personal pronouns. Ongoing debates in the relevant literature concern the extent to which different pronoun types are subject to this phenomenon, as well as the role of methodology in relevant research. In this study, we use two different experimental tasks to…

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child…

Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-"ba" alternation. The first two…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

This article presents a study on the time course of the acquisition of comparison constructions. The order in which comparison constructions (comparatives, measure phrases, superlatives, degree questions, etc.) show up in English- and German-learning children's spontaneous speech is quite fixed. It is shown to be insufficiently determined by…

This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. "John looks like he is sick") encode direct evidentiality. We then…

This study compares the development of three different types of bilingual/second language children in their acquisition of gender-marking on adjectives in Dutch to investigate whether there is evidence for age-of-onset effects in early childhood as proposed by Meisel (2009). The three groups of children are: simultaneous bilingual children,…

This article provides experimental evidence for the claim in Hayes (2004) and McCarthy (1998) that language learners are biased to assume that morphological paradigms should be phonologically-uniform--that is, that derived words should retain all the phonological properties of their bases. The evidence comes from an artificial language…

In French, the acquisition of object clitics seems delayed, and omissions are documented. In this article, we look at the experimental paradigm traditionally used to elicit object clitics and propose a new elicitation procedure that is closer to how clitics are produced in spontaneous production. We show that under the proposed new experiment, the…

When communicating with their interlocutors, adults have a robust preference to order previously mentioned ("old") referents in the discourse before mentioning referents that have not yet been introduced in the discourse ("new"). But in an experimental study investigating phrasal conjuncts, 3- to 5-year-olds acquiring German exhibit a "new-old"…

Previous research has suggested that very young children learning English adhere quite rigidly to a grammatical constraint on the possible contexts for contraction of "want" and "to" into the reduced form "wanna". Two elicited production studies reported here suggest that young children do produce "wanna" in illicit contexts. One study identifies…

One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children's early representations of word order. While studies using preferential looking methods suggest that children as early as 20 months represent word order as an abstract, grammatical property, experiments using the Weird Word Order (WWO) paradigm suggest that…

Research on children's computation of meanings involving the focus operator "only" has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether children's semantic representation of "only" is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing children's knowledge about "only" in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in…

In English the nonfinite form is simply a bare verb, but in languages with a morphological distinction it usually takes the form of an infinitive. During the relevant stage the child, unlike an adult, sometimes uses an infinitive as the main verb of a root clause. Luigi Rizzi and certain other researchers therefore favor the term "root…