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Teiwa, an Alor-Pantar language of the Trans-New Guinea family, has been characterized as expressing speech reports not with complementation, but with combinations of two clauses juxtaposed under a single intonation contour with no morphological indication for integration (Klamer 2010: A Grammar of Teiwa, Mouton de Gruyter). We argue, contra Klamer, that speech and attitude reports in Teiwa should be analyzed as embedding (or hypotaxis). We present evidence from intonation, syntax and semantics that speech reports are expressed by a single, monosentential structure in Teiwa with embedding of the speech report. Our results also show that purely morphological diagnostics can be unreliable for distinguishing between a monosentential or bisentential structure of speech reports. We describe several formal experiments from our fieldwork that provide more reliable tests. Our result has implications for both the ongoing theoretical discussions of clausal complementation, complementizer agreement, grammaticalization of complementizers and the historical evolution of complementation.

One-hundred-six 5-year-olds' (Mage = 5;6; SD = 0.40) were trained with second-order false belief tasks in one of the following conditions: (a) feedback with explanation; (b) feedback without explanation; (c) no feedback; (d) active control. The results showed that there were significant improvements in children's scores from pretest to posttest in the three experimental conditions even when children's age, verbal abilities, or working memory scores were controlled for. The training effect was stable at a follow-up session 4 months after the pretest. Overall, our results suggest that 5-year-olds' failures in second-order false belief tasks are due to lack of experience and that they can be helped over the threshold by exposure to many stories involving second-order false belief reasoning, including why questions.

We can understand and act upon the beliefs of other people, even when these conflict with our own beliefs. Children's development of this ability, known as Theory of Mind, typically happens around age 4. Research using a looking-time paradigm, however, established that toddlers at the age of 15 months old pass a non-verbal false-belief task (Onishi and Baillargeon in Science 308:255–258, 2005). This is well before the age at which children pass any of the verbal false-belief tasks. In this study we present a more complex case of false-belief reasoning with older children. We tested second-order reasoning, probing children's ability to handle the belief of one person about the belief of another person. We find just the opposite: 7-year-olds pass a verbal false-belief reasoning task, but fail on an equally complex low-verbal task. This finding suggests that language supports explicit reasoning about beliefs, perhaps by facilitating the cognitive system to keep track of beliefs attributed by people to other people.

The goal of this special issue on Interfaces is to explore the division of labor between pragmatics & grammar. In the introductory paper, a system of different modules & interface mappings has been presented. Some suggestions were made where the job of the acquisition process is. It was posed that most, if not all, acquisition is in the mapping rules itself, rather than in the modules. This paper explores the possible interaction between topicality & the interpretation of universal quantifiers. The experimental finding is that children, interpreting quantifiers, take topicality into account only when the topic is realized in subject position. Topicality has no influence on the interpretation of quantifiers in object position. This means that these children do relate pragmatic information to specific syntactic positions. 2 Figures, 20 References. Adapted from the source document

This paper pursues an analysis of verbs like Italian mordicchiare (nibble) as event-internal pluractional verbs that denote composite single events where the predicate is distributed on the fragments of one entity, and grammaticise a local form of number through the part-of relation. This opens the possibility of reading number marking in aspectual terms, whereby fragmenting is a form of modification that perturbs the mapping between event and object.

(6) a. Every boy is riding a horse. b. [Every [boy] is riding a horse] c. [[Every boy] is riding a horse] The advantage of this proposal is that both subject and object NP are in the scope of the quantifier. [...]the quantificational nature of these quantifiers demand exhaustion of both entities denoted by the subject as well as by the object. [...]in our view, all symmetrical responses by children are errors due to flaws in experimental design\" (Grain et. al.; 1996:109). According to the Weak Quantifier Hypothesis first proposed in Drozd and Van Loosbroek (1999), the explanation of spreading behavior should be found in difficulties in the formation of presuppositions. [...]Freeman, Sinha and Stedmon (1982) claim that children build up presuppositions on the basis of the presented picture.

The Going Romance conferences are a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages. Selected papers are published in the Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory volumes. This is the fourth such volume, containing a selection of the papers that have been presented at the 2002 conference, which was held at the State University of Groningen. The three-day program included a workshop on Acquisition. The articles in this volume focalize on specifics of one or more Romance languages or varieties: clausal structure, verb-movement, topic, focus and reinforcement constructions, nominal ellipsis, (absence of) pronouns in child language, and other current issues in Romance linguistics.