Most studies on the acquisition of verbal inflection have examined languages with a single verb suffix. This book offers a study on the acquisition of verb inflections in Q anjob al Maya. Q anjob al has separate inflections for aspect, subject and object agreement, and status suffixes. The subject and object inflections display a split ergative pattern. The subjects of intransitive verbs with aspect markers take absolutive markers, whereas the subjects of aspectless intransitive verbs take ergative markers. The acquisition of three types of clauses is explored in detail (imperatives,...

Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of...

The intersection of sound processing, speech production, and literacy is a promising and growing area of study. This volume showcases recent empirical research exploring the association between linguistic rhythm and reading. Linguistic rhythm does not easily assume a single definition, which is part of the motivation for this volume, and subsumes constructs including suprasegmental phonology, prosody, intonation and stress. The twelve papers collected here are the product of a gathering of like-minded researchers from the disciplines of linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental...