Prevost & Tuller (2022, henceforth P&T) present an interesting and much needed scoping review on bilingual language development and autism, putting its finger on several important issues and shortcomings in studies on (monolingual and bilingual) language (development) and autism. In this response… read more
Many acquisition studies indicate that across languages, children overgenerate definite articles in indefinite contexts. However, proportions and ages at which children make this error vary, and so do theoretical accounts. Attempting to resolve some of the mixed results, we combined the methods… read more
Some languages base their article choice on specificity (Samoan), others on definiteness (English: a vs. the). As for L2 article acquisition, Ionin, Zubizaretta, and Maldonado (2008) argue that definiteness-based article choice in the L1 (Spanish) enhances article-acquisition in a… read more
Previous studies show that Direct Object Scrambling (DOS) is impaired in Dutch-speaking children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA). However, as DOS can be considered a syntax-pragmatics interface phenomenon, it is unclear whether DOS errors are due to impaired syntax or impaired pragmatics. In… read more
This study investigates whether grammar and pragmatics are separate linguistic components or not, and whether children with SLI and children with HFA have overlapping or distinct linguistic profiles. We examine two DP-related phenomena: the mass-count distinction (grammatical) and the choice for a… read more
This study reports on the choice between a definite and an indefinite article by children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). We carried out an elicited production task with 16 Dutch-speaking non-grammatically impaired children with HFA aged… read more
We offer evidence that children correctly represent unaccusative verbs as taking a single internal argument, rather than an external argument, and they raise this argument to subject position via A-movement, contra Babyonyshev et al. (2001). Our primary evidence comes from the distribution of… read more
This chapter reports the results of a spontaneous speech study on the interaction between Case and Number in child Russian. Following Hoekstra & Hyams (1995, 1996) and Müller (1994), we hypothesize that the Number head is initially underspecified in child grammars and represents [+singular] only.… read more
In this paper we investigate the production of (null) subjects in the spontaneous speech of 15 monolingual children between the ages of 1;09 and 3;01 acquiring Hebrew, a partially pro-drop language. Our results show that all children behave adultlike regarding the pro-drop part of Hebrew.… read more