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The aim of the study was to investigate how Serbian native speaking preschool children comprehend perfective and imperfective aspect in comparison to adults. After watching animated movies with complete, incomplete and unstarted actions, the participants were asked questions with a perfective or imperfective verb form and responded by pointing to the event(s) that corresponded to each question. The results converged to a clear developmental trend in understanding of aspectual forms. The data indicate that the acquisition of perfective precedes the acquisition of imperfective: 3-year-olds typically understand only the meaning of perfective; most 5-year-olds have almost adult-like understanding of both aspectual forms, while 4-year-olds are a transitional group. Our results support the viewpoint that children’s and adults’ representations of this language category differ qualitatively, and we argue that mastering of aspect semantics is a longterm process that presupposes a certain level of cognitive and pragmatic development, and lasts throughout the preschool period.

Previous studies have shown that an early usage of verbal aspect in children’s spontaneous production is regularly observed in Slavic languages. However, this leads to the question whether the bare presence of aspect in early utterances is firm evidence that a child has acquired it. In order to show that the acquisition of aspect in Serbian is a process that lasts for several years, elicited production was inspected in children that had already achieved an apparent progress in language (3–5 year-olds). The comparisons with adults were made and several indicators of development were observed: a) the distribution of aspectual forms in children’s and adults’ language, b) the ability of functional usage of aspect in narrative, and c) the mastery of contrasting aspectual pairs. The findings provided the ground to propose three developmental stages assumed for the acquisition of Serbian aspect, and possible underlying mechanisms of development are discussed. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. ON179033]

In this study we present our adaptation and preliminary standardization of Test for Reception of Grammar TROG (Bishop, 1989) for Serbian language. TROG is a receptive test of grammatical structures, constructed primarily for an assessment of grammatical development and detection of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Due to the lack of standardized tests for language development in our clinical community, TROG is selected for adaptation as a test which includes two components relevant for discrimination of children with language difficulties: a) measure of receptive abilities and b) distinguishing knowledge of grammar from semantic aspect of comprehension. Preliminary standardization was done on a sample of 335 participants between 4 and 7 years of age, divided into 8 age subsamples. Since dynamic of language change at early ages is faster, age samples covered range of 3 months at the ages 4;0-4;2, 4;3-4;5, 4;6-4;8, 4;9-4;11, and range of 6 months at the ages 5;0-5;5, 5;6-5;11, 6;00-6;05, 6;06-6;11. Analyses have revealed that the first version of Serbian TROG is discriminative for the differences between age samples, but discrimination is smaller then it was expected. The test discriminates three age-samples (4;0-4;8, 4;9-5;5, and 5;6-6;11). It is easier for the children older then 5 years, which causes statistical significance of discrimination to tilt within a narrow margin around 0,05. Reliability of the whole instrument is estimated very high - between 0,86 and 0,91, depending on the method of estimation. However, reliability estimated for particular blocks (grammatical structure) revealed that internal consistency of blocks is not homogeneous. This finding prevents reliable estimation of competence for particular structures, and makes difficult to define which contrast is understood by a child and which is not. Furthermore, internal inconsistency of blocks may also be additional source of low discrimination of test for children older then 5. Further improvement of test, balancing of items and inclusion of additional grammatical structures in order to get a wider range of age discrimination is required. This will be done in future research.

The study proceeds from the results of the previous studies showing that the distributional characteristics (frequency) of language input are crucial for the acquisition of prepositions (Savić & Anđelković, 2005, in preparation). The authors analyze deviations in the distribution of prepositions in children's spontaneous speech from the prediction made on the basis of the distributional characteristics of prepositions in adult language. The results show that, in comparison with adult language, only the prepositions "kod" (at, by, near, beside) and "sa" (with, from, off) deviate from the prediction. It was also found out that the unexpectedly early and frequent use of the preposition "kod" in child speech stemmed from the frequent use of this preposition in child-directed speech. On the other hand, the preposition "sa", which is very frequent in child-directed speech, is not present in children's production at the earliest age, because its homonymy makes it cognitively complex. The analysis of the reasons for such a deviation provided a basis for the discussion about the possible factors and mechanisms of development: the distributional characteristics of adult language are the major factor of acquisition, but the effects of conceptual and structural complexity were recorded as well.