The emergence of clause construction in children who use speech generating devices.

This study aimed to detect patterns in clause construction structural changes produced by four participants aged 9;5-13;7 (years;months) with motor speech disorders who used speech-generating devices. Sequences of adult-child interactions, drawn from the data of a larger study focused on enhancing vocabulary and grammar skills, were examined. This current study comprises a secondary analysis of a corpus of 29 conversations totalling 808.36 min, analysing clause structures by type, linguistic complexity, and intensity of adult prompts (number of turns). Results show that, over time, the participants' clause structure complexity increased through addition of phrase-internal elements such as inflections, articles, and prepositions. Use of specific grammatical elements followed the developmental stages observed in children with typical development. For all participants, the personal pronoun I (first-person singular) emerged before she, he (third-person singular), and we or they (plural). Participants with the highest number of adult-child co-constructed clauses also had the highest number of well-formed clauses. The intensity of adult prompts increased as clause structures became more complex and as participants needed more support. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.

Exposure and feedback in language acquisition: adult construals of children's early verb-form use in Hebrew.

This study focuses on adult responses to children's verb uses, the information they provide, and how they change over time. We analyzed longitudinal samples from four children acquiring Hebrew (age-range: 1;4-2;5; child verb-forms = 8,337). All child verbs were coded for inflectional category, and for whether and how adults responded to them. Our findings show that: (a) children's early verbs were opaque with no clear inflectional target (e.g., the child-form tapes corresponds to letapes 'to-climb', metapes 'is-climbing', yetapes 'will-climb'), with inflections added gradually; (b) most early verbs were followed by adult responses using the same lexeme; and (c) as opacity in children's verbs decreased, adults made fewer uses of the same lexeme in their responses, and produced a broader array of inflections and inflectional shifts. In short, adults are attuned to what their children know and respond to their early productions accordingly, with extensive 'tailor-made' feedback on their verb uses.

Acquisition and Development of Verb/Predicate Chaining in Hebrew.

The study considers development and use of verb/predicate chaining constructions by Hebrew speakers from early childhood to adolescence, based on analysis of authentic conversational and narrative corpora. Three types of constructions are analyzed, ordered hierarchically by degree of cohesivity and obligatoriness of chaining: (1) monoclausal complex predicates (the "extended predicates" of traditional Hebrew grammars); (2) coreferential interclausal predicate chaining; and (3) discursively motivated topic chaining. Relevant typological features of Modern Hebrew are reviewed as accounting for the absence of canonical clause chaining in the language (the paucity of non-finite constructions in everyday usage, absence of an uninflected basic form of verbs, lack of auxiliary verbs, and monolexemic verb-internal complexity). Monoclausal verb chaining emerges early in the speech of toddlers in interaction with their caretakers, whereas predicate chaining by coordination across clauses occurs only later, and chunking of such constructions at the service of discourse connectivity is found only from school-age. Non-finite subordination emerges as an advanced form of clause combining, in contrast to straightforward subordination with the multifunctional subordinator se 'that'. Two main conclusions follow from the study: First, the innovative hierarchy defined here for different degrees of verb/predicate linkage mirrors developmental phases in child language; and, second, monoclausal chains of finite verbs or verbal operators followed by infinitival complements are grammatically obligatory, and are common from an early age, whereas bi- and multi-clausal predicate chaining represents an optional rhetorical choice on the part of a given speaker-writer in a particular communicative context.

Form and function in early clause-combining.

The study characterizes developmental trends in early Hebrew clause-combining (CC) by analyzing the interplay between linguistic form and communicative function in different interactional settings. Analysis applied to all utterances produced by three children aged 2; 0-3 ;0 who combined two or more clauses, either self-initiated or on the basis of adult input. Ten types of CC were analyzed for marking by connectives (e.g., the Hebrew equivalents of 'and', 'that', 'so'). Four shared consecutive developmental phases emerged: non-marking; partial marking by 'and' and 'that'; use of 'but' and 'because', favored significantly in interlocutor-supported contexts; marking of adverbial relations and more varied use of se- 'that'. These CC processes are interpreted as reflecting general properties of language development, in the form of gradually increasing specification of form-function relations under the impact of interlocutor-child interactive support combined with Hebrew-particular typological factors.