The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System is a relatively new recording technology that can be used to investigate typical child language acquisition and populations with language disorders. The purpose of this paper is to familiarize language acquisition researchers and speech-language pathologists with how the LENA System is currently being used in research. The authors outline issues i...

This paper is based upon a longitudinal study of L2 attrition in a bilingual child who grew up in an L2 migration background (Germany) and moved to the country of origin (Portugal) at the age of nine, experiencing a dominance shift from the L2 to the L1. The study aims to analyze the effects of language loss in L2 German. Data collection started 3 weeks after the child's immersion in the Portug...

In the first few years of life, a child's language undergoes tremendous changes. While it is a primary task for the student of language acquisition to document these changes, a mere description of child language, however accurate or insightful, cannot be regarded as adequate. A complete theory of language acquisition must also include a detailed account of how these changes take place, that is,...

Abstract Contraction of want to wanna is sometimes possible (e.g., Who do you to/wanna stay with ___ ? ), but impossible to/*wanna stay? ). This contrast attributable the grammatical constraint that a wh -trace blocks contraction and . Most first language (L1) second (L2) acquisition studies testing learner knowledge this have used elicited production tasks focused on adult participants, incons...

The order of acquisition of Dutch syllable types by first language learners is analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings of constraints in an optimality theoretic grammar. Initially, structural constraints are all ranked above faithfulness constraints, leading to core syllable (CV) productions only. Subsequently, faithfulness gradually rises to the highest position...

The existence of substantive parametric variation in syntax, as characterized in Chomsky 1981, has been questioned in the more recent generative literature, notably in Borer 1984, Fukui 1986, and Chomsky 1993. This article provides converging evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for the existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky 1981, with si...

During the course of first language acquisition, children produce linguistic forms that do not conform to adult grammar. In this paper, we introduce a data set and approach for systematically modeling this child-adult grammar divergence. Our corpus consists of child sentences with corrected adult forms. We bridge the gap between these forms with a discriminatively reranked noisy channel model t...

BACKGROUND Evidence is required as to when and where to focus resources to achieve the greatest gains for children's language development. Key to these decisions is the understanding of individual differences in children's language trajectories and the predictors of those differences. To determine optimal timing we must understand if and when children's relative language abilities become fixed....

Feldman et al. criticize the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) as having too much variability, too little stability, and insufficient ability to predict early language delay. We present data showing that these characteristics of the CDI are authentic reflections of individual differences in early language development rather than measurement deficiencies. We also respond to ...

PURPOSE This study examined the extent to which using non-evocative, explicit referencing of print concepts during shared storybook reading in the context of language therapy facilitated print concept knowledge in children with language impairment. METHOD Five children, ages 4 to 5 years, were provided scripted input on 20 print concepts during shared storybook reading that was incorporated i...