Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children’s nonadultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition (Philip and Coopmans (1996), Sigurjónsdóttir and Coopmans (1996)). Analyzing the antisubject orientation of pronouns in adult Norwegian as an A-Chain Condition effect at Logica...

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to assume full competence. We extended P. Bloom's study...

We begin with the hypothesis that all people are “bilingual” because every language contains ingredients from several grammars, just as English exhibits both an Anglo-Saxon and a Latinate vocabulary system. We argue that the dominant grammar is defined by productivity and recursion in particular. Although current evidence is sparse, in principle, for a child who shows SLI in a bilingual environ...

Jakobson’s 1941/1968 monograph on child language is probably still the most frequently cited work on acquisition of phonology, while Smith’s 1973 book is often mentioned for its well-documented, phonetically transcribed longitudinal data, its very thorough analysis of the data in a now somewhat out-of-date SPE framework, and its discussion of many issues that are still subject to debate, as for...

This prospective longitudinal study examined the contribution of dimensions of maternal responsiveness (descriptions, play, imitations) to the timing of five milestones in children's (N = 40) early expressive language: first imitations, first words, 50 words in expressive language, combinatorial speech, and the use of language to talk about the past. Events-History Analysis, a statistical techn...

In research on language development by bilingual children, the early language environment is commonly characterized in terms of the relative amount of exposure a child gets to each language based on parent report. Little is known about how absolute measures of child-directed speech in two languages relate to language growth. In this study of 3-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 18), tradi...

This paper describes the biolinguistic approach to language acquisition. We contrast the biolinguistic approach with a usage-based approach. We argue that the biolinguistic approach is superior because it provides more accurate and more extensive generalizations about the properties of human languages, as well as a better account of how children acquire human languages. To distinguish between t...

AIMS (1) To study the influence of different styles of parent-child interaction in the language development of very young deaf children. (2) To find out if there are differences in parent-child interaction between two groups of very young deaf children following an Aural/Oral or a Bilingual approach to education. METHODS Subjects were selected from all deaf children in the County of Avon who ...

This paper uses data from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to study the returns to language skills of child and adult migrants in the US labor market. We employ an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits diff erences in language acquisition profi les between immigrants from Englishand non-English-speaking countries of origin, to address problems related to endogeneity and measure...