Stephen Crain

List of John Benjamins publications for which Stephen Crain plays a role.

Book series

Articles

Giblin, Iain, Peng Zhou, Cory Bill, Jiawei Shi and Stephen Crain 2024 Chapter 2. To acquire a recursive grammar, children start with a recursive procedure (MERGE)Multifaceted Multilingualism, Grohmann, Kleanthes K. (ed.), pp. 22–46 | Chapter
Recursion is a central topic in language acquisition because it helps to inform an explanatorily adequate theory of the human language faculty. Some researchers (e.g., Roeper, 2011) have proposed that it is possible for children’s early grammars to include a transitory acquisition stage that is… read more
This study investigated the interpretation assigned to disjunction by Mandarin-speaking children and adults in negative sentences with either overt or covert disjunction. In one condition, both negation and disjunction were phonologically realized in the second conjunct of a coordinate structure.… read more
According to a recent proposal, children license a conjunctive inference for statements with disjunction even without a licensing expression that adults require, e.g., the deontic modal verb is allowed to (Singh, Wexler, Astle, Kamawar, & Fox, 2016; Tieu et al., 2017). However, the rates of… read more
Crain, Stephen and Peng Zhou 2018 Chapter 11. The meaning of question words in statements in child MandarinSemantics in Language Acquisition, Syrett, Kristen and Sudha Arunachalam (eds.), pp. 250–274 | Chapter
This paper reports the findings of three experiments investigating children’s emerging knowledge of the semantics of information-seeking questions and declarative statements in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is particularly revealing about the semantic relationship between questions and statements,… read more
Geçkin, Vasfiye, Stephen Crain and Rosalind Thornton 2016 Acquisition of scope relations by Turkish-English bilingual childrenThe Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood, Haznedar, Belma and F. Nihan Ketrez (eds.), pp. 119–150 | Article
This is a bidirectional case study in the acquisition of semantics by Turkish – English bilingual children. The research question is whether bilingual children acquiring Turkish and English use parental input versus a principle of language learnability, as the basis for their initial interpretation… read more
Crain, Stephen, Takuya Goro and Utako Minai 2007 14. Hidden units in child languageMental States: Volume 1: Evolution, function, nature, Schalley, Andrea C. and Drew Khlentzos (eds.), pp. 275–294 | Article
Thornton, Rosalind and Stephen Crain 1994 Succesful Cyclic MovementLanguage Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar, Hoekstra, Teun and Bonnie D. Schwartz (eds.), pp. 215 ff. | Article