This paper addresses the relationship between the frequency of morphological, lexical and syntactic forms in the input and children’s language acquisition. The problem of obtaining reliable frequency measures under different sampling regimes is discussed. Since children are not simple associationist processors onto which the frequency of hearing or producing a string maps directly, a number of ...

This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions...

Usage-based models of language focus on the speci®c communicative events in which people learn and use language. In these models, the psycholinguistic units with which individuals operate are determined not by theoretical ®at but by observation of actual language use in actual communicative events. This data-based approach make these models especially congenial for the analysis of children's la...

The passive construction is a late acquisition in child language. In this paper I evaluate the claim that difficulty with noncanonical semantics, rather than non-mature subject-object A-chains, underlie young children’s poor performance on the passive. In a series of truth-value judgment tasks, 4and 5-year-old English-speaking children were tested on their comprehension of matrix passives and p...

abstract the role of l1 in second/foreign language learning has been the subject of much debate and controversy. this article reports on a piece of research carried out in a junior high school in isfahan, iran. this study was conducted to examine the effect of using translation from l1 to l2 on the improvement of efl learners' language accuracy. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 62 stud...

this is a longitudinal case study of two farsi-speaking children learning english: ‘bernard’ and ‘melissa’, who were 7;4 and 8;4 at the start of data collection. the research deals with the initial state and further development in the child second language (l2) acquisition of syntax regarding the presence or absence of copula as a functional category, as well as the role and degree of l1 influe...