Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether German children are able to use the grammatical cues of word order and word endings (case markers) to identify agents and patients in a causative sentence and whether they weigh these two cues differently across development. Two-year-olds correctly understood only sentences with both cues supporting each other--the prototypical form. Five-year-olds were able to use word order by itself but not case markers. Only 7-year-olds behaved like adults by relying on case markers over word order when the two cues conflicted. These findings suggest that prototypical instances of linguistic constructions with redundant grammatical marking play a special role in early acquisition, and only later do children isolate and weigh individual grammatical cues appropriately.

Abbot-Smith, Kirsten and Tomasello, Michael (2006)

This is a repository copy of Individual differences in children's pragmatic ability: a review of associations with formal language, social cognition and executive functions.

Typically developing 2;6-year-olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers.

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein "to be" or werden "to become," and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein-before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently "sudden" acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. Keywords: Grammatical acquisition; Transfer; Passive and future constructionsOne of the key issues in language acquisition research is why children appear to learn certain aspects of grammar very quickly, whereas other aspects appear to develop only very gradually. Attempts to account for this can be divided into emergentist or usage-based theories on the one hand and, on the other, theories that assume innate representations of certain syntactic categories and principles (linguistic representational nativist theories). Emergentist and usage-based theories argue that grammar is learned through mechanisms that are not necessarily limited to language learning. Thus, input frequency crucially impacts the speed of acquisition as do other factors related to general cognitive constraints such as

Child Lang. 26 (1999) 339.] found that when 4-year-old English-speaking children hear novel verbs in transitive utterances with ungrammatical word orders (e.g., Elmo the tree meeked ), they correct them to canonical SVO order almost all of the time. However, when 3-year-olds and older 2-year-olds hear these same utterances, they waver between correcting and using the ungrammatical ordering. In the current study, we adapted this task for children at 2;4, using an intransitive construction. The major finding was that children corrected the noncanonical word order less than half as often as Akhtar's 2-yearold subjects who were approximately 4 months older. At the same time, however, children showed in several ways that they had some implicit understanding of canonical SV order; for example, they used the novel verb which they heard used in grammatical word order more often than the novel verb which they heard in ungrammatical word order, and they consistently used pronouns and the progressive -s auxiliary in appropriate ways. The current findings thus contribute to a growing body of theory and research suggesting that the ontogenetic emergence of linguistic categories and schemas is a gradual process, as is the emergence of categories in other domains of cognitive development. D

Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006 ) found that 21‐month‐old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb‐general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding. Following Gertner et al. (2006 ), one group of German children was tested only after they had received a training/practice phase containing transitive sentences with familiar verbs and the exact same nouns as those used at test. A second group was tested after a training/practice phase consisting only of familiar verbs, without the nouns used at test. Only the group of children with the training on full transitive sentences was successful in the test. These findings suggest that for children this young to succeed in this test of syntactic understanding, they must first have some kind of relevant linguistic experience immediately prior to testing – which raises the question of the nature of children's linguistic representations at this early point in development.

To estimate the impact of linguistic distance on vocabulary development, which was the aim of Study 1, we needed to account for the effects of all situational factors that were known or suspected to shape bilingual development. This was achieved through a two-step analyses of the data from the 372 children whose Additional Language was 1 of our 13 target languages. PLAN OF ANALYSESIn the first step, analyses were conducted on variables already established within the literature as strong predictors of vocabulary size (relative amount of exposure to each language in child-directed speech and overheard speech, gender, and SES). Analyses were conducted initially in ANCOVAs (to include