German uses noun case markers to reveal who did what to whom. Young learners of these languages use both case markers and number of nouns—separately–in sentence comprehension and verb acquisition.

Noah’s Ark framework

• Leischner, F., Weissenborn, J. & Naigles, L.R. Morphosyntactic bootstrapping in German: Interacting roles of argument number, case marker, and verb type. Language Learning and Development.

The unique format of prepositions helps French learners with verb acquisition!

• Naigles, L. & Lehrer, N. (2002) Language-general and language-specific influences on children’s acquisition of argument structure: A comparison of French and English. Journal of Child Language 29, 545-566.