Scalar implicatures (SIs) lie at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and therefore have evoked great interest for language acquisition research. Many acquisition studies show that young children know the literal semantics of scalar items (like "some", "might", "start" and "or") but have…

A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones…

For centuries, adults may have relied on pedagogies that promote rote memory for the learning of foreign languages through word associations and grammar rules. This contrasts sharply with child language learning which unfolds in socially interactive contexts. In this paper, we advocate an approach to study the social brain of language by grounding…

In 'Against Stored Abstractions,' Ambridge uses neural and computational evidence to make his case against abstract representations. He argues that storing only exemplars is more parsimonious -- why bother with abstraction when exemplar models with on-the-fly calculation can do everything abstracting models can and more -- and implies that his…

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

Children from language minority homes reach school age with variable dual language skills. Cluster analysis identified four bilingual profiles among 126 U.S.-born, 5-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals. The profiles differed on two dimensions: language balance and total language knowledge. Balance varied primarily as a function of indicators of…

Generic language ("Owls eat at night") expresses knowledge about categories and may represent a cognitively default mode of generalization. English-speaking children and adults more accurately recall generic than quantified sentences ("All owls eat at night") and tend to recall quantified sentences as generic. However, generics…

Theories of cognitive development must address both the issue of how children bring their knowledge to bear on behavior in-the-moment, and how knowledge changes over time. We argue that seeking answers to these questions requires an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the developing system in its full, reciprocal complexity. We illustrate this…