Purpose: Our goal was to compare statistical learning abilities between preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD) and peers with typical development (TD) by assessing their learning of two artificial grammars. Method: Four- and 5-year-olds with and without DLD were compared on their statistical learning ability using two artificial…

Contending with talker variability has been found to lead to processing costs but also benefits by focusing learners on invariant properties of the signal, indicating that talker variability acts as a desirable difficulty. That is, talker variability may lead to initial costs followed by long-term benefits for retention and generalization. Adult…

Purpose: Although conversational recast treatment is generally efficacious, there are many ways in which the individual components of the treatment can be delivered. Some of these are known to enhance treatment, others appear to interfere with learning, and still others appear to have no impact at all. This study tests the potential effect of…

This dissertation sets out to find an answer to the question why not all logically conceivable patterns are found typologically. In other words, my aim is to find paradigmatic gaps and explain their absence. In doing so, I use the mathematical notion of monotonicity (which is a more general term to convey order preservation) as proposed by Graf…

Measuring similarity of educational items has several applications in the development of adaptive learning systems, and previous research has already proposed a wide range of similarity measures. In this work, we provide an experimental evaluation of selected similarity measures using a large dataset. The used items are alternate-choice questions…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate implicit learning in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by employing a visual artificial grammar learning task. Method: Thirteen children with DLD and 24 children with typical language development between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a visual artificial grammar learning…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

Data-driven learning uncontroversially plays a role in human language acquisition--how large a role is a matter of much debate. The success of artificial neural networks in NLP in recent years calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of the possibilities for learning grammar from data alone. This dissertation argues the case for using…

Morphological variability in bilingual language production is widely attested. Producing inflected words has been found to be less reliable and consistent in bilinguals than in first-language (functionally monolingual) L1 speakers, even for bilingual speakers at advanced proficiency levels. The sources for these differences are not well…

This study is a replication and extension of Morgan-Short et al.'s (2018) investigation into the role of attention in input processing by L1-Polish learners of L2-Spanish, with proficiency and language of assessment explored as two key methodological factors. Our aims were twofold: to investigate learners' comprehension in different conditions…

Second language learners constitute a significant and expanding portion of the global population and there is a growing demand for tools that facilitate language learning and instruction across various levels and in different countries. The development of large language models (LLMs) has brought about a significant impact on the domains of natural…

A growing body of research examines attitudes towards English varieties from an impressionistic perspective, but relatively few studies investigate attitudes towards specific standard and variant grammatical features. This study explores the language attitudes of Thai university students and teachers towards standard grammar and its variation in…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at…

English ditransitive verbs show a complex alternation between the double object construction (DOC, (1)) and prepositional object datives (POD, (2)). This dissertation examines the acquisition, representation, and learnability of the dative alternation among L2 English learners, presenting experimental data from participants with L1 backgrounds of…