Stephen Crain
List of John Benjamins publications for which Stephen Crain plays a role.
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
2019 The interpretation of disjunction in VP ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ionin, Tania and Matthew Rispoli (eds.), pp. 107–124 | Chapter
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
2019 When OR is conjunctive in child Mandarin Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ionin, Tania and Matthew Rispoli (eds.), pp. 125–142 | Chapter
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
2018 Chapter 11. The meaning of question words in statements in child Mandarin Semantics in Language Acquisition, Syrett, Kristen and Sudha Arunachalam (eds.), pp. 249–274 | 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
2016 Acquisition of scope relations by Turkish-English bilingual children The 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
2007 14. Hidden units in child language Mental States: Volume 1: Evolution, function, nature, Schalley, Andrea C. and Drew Khlentzos (eds.), pp. 275–294 | Article
1994 Succesful Cyclic Movement Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar, Hoekstra, Teun and Bonnie D. Schwartz (eds.), pp. 215–252 | Article