Significance: Although much research has been devoted to the acquisition of number words, relatively little is known about the acquisition of other expressions of quantity. We propose that the order of acquisition of quantifiers is related to features inherent to the meaning of each term. Four specific dimensions of the meaning and use of quantifiers are found to capture robust similarities in the order of acquisition of quantifiers in similar ways across 31 languages, representing 11 language types.

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article.

This cross-linguistic study evaluates children’s understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and full passive hold cross-linguistically. The present study offers two major findings. The first is the relative ease in which 5-year-old children across 11 different languages are able to comprehend short passive constructions (compared to the full passive). The second and perhaps the more intriguing finding is the variation seen across the different languages in children’s comprehension of full passive constructions. We argued, based on the present findings, that given the relevant linguistic input (e.g., flexibility in word order and experience with argument reduction), children at the age of 5 are capable of acquiring both the short passive and the full passive. Variation, however, stems from the specific characteristics of each language, and good mastery of passives by the age of 5 is not a universal, cross-linguistically valid milestone in typical language acquisition. Therefore, difficulties with passives (short or full) can be used for identifying SLI at the age of 5 only in those languages in which it has already been mastered by typically developing children.

We investigated the processing of agreement marking and case marking in the comprehension of German relative clauses in 48 seven-year-old monolingual German-speaking children in a picture selection task. We examined the relation between the effectiveness of these different morphological cues and individual memory resources as measured by a digit-span test. Relative clauses were disambiguated either by agreement marking on the embedded verb or by case marking on the embedded determiner phrase. The results show that subject-extracted relative clauses (subject RCs) are more easily comprehended than object-extracted relative clauses (object RCs) and that case disambiguation is more effective than agreement disambiguation. Moreover, we found a relation between individual phonological short-term memory and the effectiveness of the different disambiguating cues in the comprehension of object RCs but not in the comprehension of subject RCs. We found that: (i) children with a low-digit span score have difficulties in the comprehension of case and agreement disambiguated object RCs, (ii) children with a medium-digit span score have difficulties in the comprehension of agreement disambiguated object RCs but not difficulties with case disambiguated object RCs, and (iii) children with a larger digit span score have no difficulties in the comprehension of agreement and case disambiguated object RCs. We explain our results under the Diagnosis and Repair Model ( Fodor & Inoue, 2000 Fodor, D. J. and Inoue, A. 2000. Syntactic features in reanalysis: Positive and negative symptoms. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(1): 25–36. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ) by arguing that children by age 7 have adult-like competence and processing strategies for these structures and that observable differences depend on individual memory resources as measured by a digit span task.