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摘要：Previous studies have found that the early fitting of cochlear implants in children has beneficial effects on their expressive and receptive language. However, different ages are identified in different studies, and some studies present contradictory results. Starting from these observations, our study suggests that at least two additional factors play an important role in determining linguistic outcomes. The first is the area of language under investigation: lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The second factor is the typological features of the child's target language. Our study, which involved 33 Italian-speaking children who received a cochlear implant and 33 age and gender matched controls, reveals that lexical, semantic, pragmatic, and phonological knowledge are not particularly vulnerable in these children. By contrast, one area of morphosyntax (production of clitic pronouns) is especially challenging. In addition, an effect of age of implantation was found only in this morphosyntactic area. This is the first study on language development in Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of 'early' and 'late' phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Two separate studies examined older siblings' influence on the language exposure and language development of US-born toddlers who were being raised in bilingual homes. The participants in Study 1 were 60 children between 16 and 30 months who had heard English and another language at home from birth; 26 had older siblings, and 34 did not. The participants in Study 2 were 27 children, assessed at 22 and 30 months, who had heard English and Spanish from birth; 14 had school-aged older siblings, and 13 did not. Both studies found that older siblings used English more in talking to the toddlers than did other household members and that toddlers with older siblings were more advanced in English language development. Study 2 also found that the presence of a school-aged older sibling increased mothers' use of English with their toddlers and that toddlers without a school-aged older sibling were more advanced in Spanish than the toddlers with a school-aged older sibling. These findings contribute to a picture of the complex processes that shape language use in bilingual homes and cause variability in young children's bilingual development. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examined the comprehension of actional and psychological verbs in both their active and passive (short and long) forms by 99 Serbian-speaking children. The children, whose age ranged between 3 years, 6 months (3;6) and 7 years, 6 months (7;6), were divided into three groups: 3;6-5 (M = 4.3), 5;1-6;1 (M = 5.6), and 6;2-7;6 (M = 7.0). All groups reached ceiling performance on actives of both actional and psychological verbs. They showed a good performance on passives of actional verbs, both short and long, but an exceptionally low performance on passives of psychological verbs: only the oldest group, 7-year-olds, reached 80% correct performance on psychological passives. There were no differences in the children's performance on short versus long passives of either type of the verb. These results are in line with studies reporting delayed passive comprehension in children younger than 5 in a number of languages, suggesting a delay in the comprehension of this structure cross-linguistically. The discrepancy observed in the comprehension of psychological passives, as opposed to actional actives, fits neatly into Borer and Wexler's account, which relates children's difficulties in this area to their underlying knowledge of argument chains created by movement of sentential elements. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines vocabulary growth rates in first and second languages for Spanish-speaking and Cantonese-speaking English language learners from kindergarten through second grade. Growth-modeling results show a within-language effect of concepts about print on vocabulary. Language exposure also had an effect on English vocabulary: earlier English exposure led to larger English vocabulary in kindergarten. There was no interference of early English exposure on native-language vocabulary. Moreover, Cantonese-speaking children had higher English expressive vocabulary scores than Spanish-speaking children and this difference remained for the 3 years. In contrast, although there were no significant differences in first language vocabulary at the start of kindergarten, Spanish-speaking children had steeper growth rates in first-language vocabulary than Cantonese-speaking children, after controlling for language of instruction and first-language concepts about print. Adapted from the source document

摘要：We assessed the language, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities of 27 internationally adopted children from China, adopted by French-speaking parents, 12 of whom had been assessed previously by Gauthier and Genesee. The children were on average 7 years, 10 months old and were matched to nonadopted monolingual French-speaking children on age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Although there were no significant differences between the groups with respect to socioemotional and cognitive development, the adoptees scored significantly lower than the controls on measures of receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, word definitions, and sentence recall, findings that were similar to those reported by Gauthier and Genesee. Analyses of correlations between the adopted children's language test results and their age at adoption, length of exposure to the adoption language, health, and other developmental problems revealed relatively few significant associations. In contrast, analyses of the relationship between their language test scores and their performance on the recalling sentences subtest suggest a link between performance on these two tests. We speculate on the role that performance on sentence recall might play in mediating differences in language outcomes between the two groups of children.

摘要：This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., the tigers) and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., tigers) in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic readings in English are expressed with bare plurals, which are ungrammatical in Spanish in preverbal subject position. Two studies were conducted in order to investigate the role of first language transfer in this domain in both English --> Spanish and Spanish --> English directions. Study 1 used a meaning-focused task to probe learners' interpretation of definite plural noun phrases, whereas Study 2 used a form-focused task to examine learners' judgments of the acceptability of definite and bare plurals in generic versus specific contexts. First language transfer was attested in both directions, at lower proficiency levels, whereas more targetlike performance was attested at higher proficiency levels. Furthermore, learners were found to be more successful in learning about the (un)grammaticality of bare plurals in the target language than in assigning the target interpretation to definite versus bare plurals. This finding is shown to be consistent with other studies' findings of plural noun phrase interpretation in monolingual and bilingual children.

摘要：Often, the classification of words does not go beyond "difficult" (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or "easy" (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word properties into seven clusters of words. Each cluster represents a group of words that share a particular configuration of word properties. This model was empirically validated with three data sets from Grades 2 to 4 children who made either a lexical decision task or a use decision task with a selection of the words. Significant differences were found between the clusters of words within the three data sets. Implications for further study and for practice are discussed.

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摘要：Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present study we describe the nature and extent of vowel variation in nearly 900 vowel tokens in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language of northern Australia, which, like bilingual input, has differences in the relative frequency of adjacent, overlapping vowel categories. In Analysis 1, we provide the first systematic account of vowel variation and phone frequency in maternal speech in Gurindji Kriol. In Analysis 2, cluster analysis was applied to the vowel formant and duration data, to see what categories might emerge from acoustic data alone. The results suggest that, were infants to base their initial vowel categories solely on the clusters emerging in acoustic space, they might likely set up relatively few vowel categories. We discuss implications for how infants may learn Gurindji Kriol and for distributional learning. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The study examined the acquisition of two morphological procedures of noun pluralization in Palestinian Arabic: Sound Feminine Plural (SFP) and Broken Plural (BP). We tested if noun pluralization was affected by (1) the type of morphological procedure, (2) the degree of familiarity with the singular noun stem, and (3) the frequency of plural patterns. Thirty-six native Arabic-speaking children in three age groups were tested on three experimental tasks: a repetition task, a structured production task, and a seminatural production task. In line with earlier research, the results showed that SFP pluralization was acquired earlier and had a shorter developmental trajectory than BP plurals. Also, the errors of children showed that SFP was a dominant default procedure. However, despite its early consolidation, SFP formation was affected by familiarity with the singular noun stem. BP nouns also appeared rather early in the production of children and were affected by both familiarity with the noun stem and frequency of the plural pattern. Yet, they took longer to acquire and did not reach comparable levels to SFP in the age groups tested. The implications of the results for models of language acquisition and the acquisition of Arabic morphology are discussed. Adapted from the source document

摘要：According to generative linguistic theory, certain principles underlying language structure are innately given, accounting for how children are able to acquire their mother tongues (L1s) despite a mismatch between the linguistic input and the complex unconscious mental representation of language that children achieve. This innate structure is referred to as Universal Grammar (UG); it includes universal principles, as well as parameters which allow for constrained variation across languages. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The aim of this study was to use crosslinguistic data from French-English bilinguals to test two models of past tense acquisition: (a) single route (all past tense forms rely on morphophonological schemas) and (b) dual route (irregular forms are learned as words, regulars through rules). These models make similar predictions about English acquisition, the focus of most previous research. French irregular verbs are often low in token frequency but high in family resemblance. Past tense forms of regular and irregular verbs in English and French were elicited from children between 3 and 5 years of age. Both models could explain most results. Two findings with French were more compatible with a single-route model, suggesting that this is a stronger explanation for crosslinguistic data. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study investigates the development of plural adjective agreement in Hebrew, focusing on the consolidation of Hebrew number/gender morphology in children and adolescents across the school years in comparison with adults. A total of 240 Hebrew-speaking participants in seven consecutive grade levels (kindergarten to sixth grade) plus a group of 30 adults were administered a set of 32 singular noun-adjective noun phrases, which they had to pluralize. Head nouns were classified by noun gender (masculine and feminine), suffix type (regular and irregular), and stem type (nonchanging and changing). Children's ability to correctly pluralize nouns and adjectives increased markedly from kindergarten to adulthood, whereas reaction time to the correct plural phrase decreased concomitantly. Noun gender, stem, and suffix morphology impacted noun and adjective plural marking as well as reaction time. Results are discussed in view of the critical role of noun gender as a central organizing factor in the development of Hebrew plural marking. Adapted from the source document