Demuth, K. 1996. Alignment, stress and parsing in early

It has long been noted that children’s early words are truncated in form, and that those forms show a certain degree of variability in shape. In this paper I argue that children’s early word productions can best be understood in terms of output constraints on surface form. First, I show that children’s early grammars allow for the emergence of the

to renewed interest in the acquisition of prosodic structures, with particular attention given to the development of syllables and prosodic words (Demuth 1995; Gnanadesikan, in press; Pater, 1997). Many of these studies investigate

to find crosslinguistic differences in the timing of the acquisition of determiners (Lleo! & Demuth, 1999), nor the variable appearance of grammatical morphemes in some contexts and not others (Demuth, 1994, Gerken, 1996). These cases of crosslinguistic and within-language variation call for a more

misunderstood works by American modernist Charles Demuth. Past interpretations of the painting have focused on the visual similarity of the depicted grain elevators to architectural wonders of the ancient world and/or on the ironic juxtaposition of image and title. Building upon these analyses

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother–child dyads each; ages of children between 0;11 and 1;8) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants’ assignment of words to lexical and functional item categories. Distributional, phonological, and acoustic measures were analysed. In each language, lexical and functional items (i.e. syllabic morphemes) differed significantly on numerous measures. Despite differences in mean values between categories, distributions of values typically displayed substantial overlap. However, simulations with self-organizing neural networks supported the conclusion that although individual dimensions had low cue validity, in each language multidimensional constellations of presyntactic cues are sufficient to guide assignment of words to rudimentary grammatical categories.

in the acquisition of prosodic structures (Fee 1992, Demuth 1995a, Demuth & Fee 1995). The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of inter-speaker variation at different stages in the development of prosodic words. In section 1. I present the Prosodic Hierarchy and the stages in the development

Bantu languages exhibit two different surface word orders in object relative clauses (Demuth & Harford 1999). Some languages (e.g. Sesotho) preserve basic SV word order, while others (e.g. Chishona) exhibit VS word order. Closer analysis reveals that the object relative complementizer

The acquisition of southern Bantu languages has been relatively well studied, with dissertations on the acquisition of the Sotho languages Sesotho (Connelly 1984, Demuth 1984) and Setswana (Tsonope 1987), and the Nguni languages Siswati (Kunene 1979) and Zulu (Suzman 1991), as well as a number

French, where two-year-olds were better at producing word-initial than word-final clusters (Demuth & Kehoe, 2006). The purpose of the present study was to examine French-speaking children’s longitudinal acquisition of clusters to determine if these results replicate developmentally. Analysis