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We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

Introduction: In complex adverbial sentences, the connectives because and if can perform different pragmatic functions (e.g. Content, Speech-Act), although this is often overlooked in studies investigating children's acquisition of these connectives. In this study, we investigated whether pragmatic variation is responsible for some of the difficulty young children have in understanding because - and if -sentences and tested the extent to which patterns of acquisition are related to the cognitive complexity or input frequency of the different pragmatic types. Methods: Ninety-two children (aged 3–5; F = 39) and 20 adults (F = 12) took part in a forced-choice picture task where they had to identify correct pictures after hearing Content and Speech-Act because - and if -sentences. Results: Results showed that children were most accurate on the sentence type where cognitive simplicity and input frequency converge (If Content), but this pattern was largely driven by the girls in the study. For response times, children were fastest with the least cognitively complex sentence types. However, for because Speech-Act sentences, there was an inverse relationship between response time and input frequency. Discussion: Taken together, these findings suggest that neither account (cognitive complexity or input frequency) can fully explain the findings. Instead, we suggest that the relative contributions of both factors are best understood in terms of the relevance of these utterances to children and the precise contexts in which children hear these utterances produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence preferences to describe causal events in English- and Japanese-speaking children (aged three and five years) and compared this to preferences displayed by adults. We studied two factors suggested to influence this choice: Language (Corpus study & Experiment 1) and Intentionality (Experiment 2). Participants watched videos depicting familiar and novel causal actions, and made a best-match choice between a transitive and intransitive description. We found a stronger preference for intransitive sentences with causal verbs and more frequent argument omissions in Japanese child-directed speech than in English child-directed speech. The trajectory of acquisition in the selection of transitive sentences for causal events differed between languages. For intentionality, with familiar verbs both Japanese and English speakers selected fewer transitives for accidental than intentional scenes, but this pattern was more pronounced in Japanese speakers. However, with novel verbs, only five-year-olds and adults showed this preference. These data provide important new information to constrain theories about the process of learning to map event structure to language, and its interdependence with intentionality and the distributional properties of linguistic input to children.

An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6-3;0 and 3;6-4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT-constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English-speaking children's infinitival to omission errors (e.g., *"I want ___ jump now"). In two between-participant groups, children either just heard or heard and repeated WANT-to, WANT-X, and control prime sentences after which to-infinitival constructions were elicited. We found that both age groups were primed, but in different ways. In the 2;6-3;0 year olds, WANT-to primes facilitated the provision of "to" in target utterances relative to the control contexts, but no significant effect was found for WANT-X primes. In the 3;6-4;0 year olds, both WANT-to and WANT-X primes showed a priming effect, namely WANT-to primes facilitated and WANT-X primes inhibited provision of "to." We argue that these effects reflect developmental differences in the level of proficiency in and preference for the two constructions, and they are broadly consistent with "priming as implicit learning" accounts. The current study shows that (a) children as young as 2;6-3;0 years of age can be primed when they have only heard (not repeated) particular constructions, (b) children are acquiring at least two constructions for the matrix verb WANT, and (c) that these two WANT-constructions compete for production.

Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __"want"__, __"see"__, and __"get"__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and creativity of use in these slots. We do so using a rigorously controlled sample of child speech and child directed speech from three English-speaking children between the ages of 2-3 years and their caregivers. We find different levels of creativity and flexibility between the adult and child samples for some measures, for some slots, and for some developmental periods. We discuss these differences in the context of verb frame semantics, conventionality versus creativity and child errors, and draw some tentative conclusions regarding developmental changes in children's early grammatical representations.

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in children's speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive experimental study to date. We tested four-year-olds, five-year-olds and adults on four different adverbial clauses (before, after, because, if) to evaluate four different theoretical models (semantic, syntactic, frequency-based and capacity-constrained). 71 children and 10 adults (as controls) completed a forced-choice, picture-selection comprehension test, providing accuracy and response time data. Children also completed a battery of tests to assess their linguistic and general cognitive abilities. We found that children's comprehension was strongly influenced by semantic factors - the iconicity of the event-to-language mappings - and that their response times were influenced by the type of relation expressed by the connective (temporal vs. causal). Neither input frequency (frequency-based account), nor clause order (syntax account) or working memory (capacity-constrained account) provided a good fit to the data. Our findings thus contribute to the development of more sophisticated models of sentence processing. We conclude that such models must also take into account how children's emerging linguistic understanding interacts with developments in other cognitive domains such as their ability to construct mental models and reason flexibly about them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many ways to decline a noun: elicitation of children's novel noun inflection in Estonian. Keywords: morphological acquisition; case-marking; novel nouns; wug method; Estonian; erratum EN morphological acquisition case-marking novel nouns wug method Estonian erratum 215 215 1 02/21/23 20230101 NES 230101 This article was originally published with an error in the affiliations for Felix Engelmann and Elena V. M. Lieven. Many ways to decline a noun: Elicitation of children's novel noun inflection in Estonian - ERRATUM. [Extracted from the article]