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The study compares the rate and type of the anaphoric pronominalisation in narratives produced by adults, by monolingual and by consecutive and simultaneous bilingual five-year-old children. In particular, it addresses the question which types of pronouns children use to refer to previously introduced antecedents and which syntactic role these antecedent NPs exhibit. Results show that consecutive bilinguals show a lower pronominalisation rate as compared to the narratives of monolingual German-speaking children and to their own Russian narratives. These findings are discussed within the construction-based model of language acquisition (Tomasello 2003). Language-specific organisation of the pronominal systems as well as the language-specific structural features are argued to have an impact on the pronominalisation rate in discourse.

Inflectional classes are a property of the ideal inflecting-fusional language type. Thus strongly inflecting languages have the most complex vertical and horizontal stratification of hierarchical tree structures. Weakly inflecting languages which also approach the ideal isolating type or languages which also approach the agglutinating type have much shallower structures. Such properties follow from principles of Natural Morphology and from the distinction of the descendent hierarchy of macroclasses, classes, subclasses, subsubclasses etc. and homogeneous microclasses. The main languages of illustration are Latin, Lithuanian, Russian, German, French, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish.

Russisch, русский язык(russkij jazyk), und Ukrainisch, українська мова(ukrajins’ka mova), gehoren zu den modernen ostslawischen Sprachen. Die dritte im Bunde ist Weisrussisch, беларуска мова(belaruska mova) oder тарашкевіца(taraskevica). Generell betrachtet man die ostslawischen Sprachen als „melodische“ Sprachen. Das Ukrainische mit seiner stark ausgepragten Tendenz zu offenen Silben gilt als die melodischste von allen: Die Muttersprachler nennen sie sogar спiвуча мова(spivuca mova) ‚melodische Sprache‘.

This study proposes a new methodology for determining the relationship between child-directed speech and child speech in early acquisition. It illustrates the use of this methodology in investigating the relationship between the morphological richness of child-directed speech and the speed of morphological development in child speech. Both variables are defined in terms of mean size of paradigm (MSP) and estimated in a set of longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora of nine children and their caretakers. The children are aged 1;3–3;0, acquiring nine different languages that vary in terms of morphological richness. The main result is that the degree of morphological richness in child-directed speech is positively related to the speed of development of noun and verb paradigms in child speech.

The book addresses a controversial current topic in language acquisition studies: the impact of frequency on linguistic structure in child language. A major strength of the book is that the role of input frequency in the acquisition process is evaluated in a large variety of languages, topics and the two major theoretical frameworks: UG-based and usage-based accounts. While most papers report a clear frequency effect, different factors that may be interacting with pure statistical effects are critically assessed. An introductory statement is made by Thomas Roeper who calls for caution as he identifies frequency as a non-coherent concept and argues for a precise definition of what can and cannot be explained by statistical effects.

This paper deals with the differences in the early acquisition of verb constructions by two L1 Russian-speaking and two L1 English-speaking children and compares the emergence of finite and non-finite verb forms in the first six months of early verb production. As an analysis of the early verb forms will show, large language-specific differences exist with regard to the amount of finite vs. non-finite verb forms in the children's early productions although children acquiring either language display a preference for infinitival and/or other non-finite verb forms for a short period of time. Given the notable differences between Russian and English with regard to the richness of the inflectional system and the predominantly synthetic versus the predominantly analytical nature of Russian versus English verb constructions, the paper aims to show to what extent language-specific properties including the frequency of linguistic elements may contribute to the acquisition of different verbal constructions.

Our results indicate some differences in the use of aspect between French and Croatian speaking children. In Croatian language children always manage to keep the appropriate aspect, unlike French children. However, the imperfective aspect seems to be better acquired in French children than the perfective aspect. The perfective aspect, the marked form both in French as well as in Croatian, is related to the lexical meaning of the verbs. The acquisition of the Aktionsart in both languages seems to be more a matter of semantics than of morphology. Furthermore, our data suggest the existence of a specific developmental trend in the use of Aktionsart (intensive, iterative and inchoative), which is similar for children speaking Slavic and Romanic languages., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, Bd. 29 (2003): Acquisition of aspect