How can syntactic and learnability analyses inform each other, and thus deepen our understanding of syntax and its acquisition? This dissertation illuminates this question through three case studies in Korean syntax. I examine cases in which two structures that display distinct syntactic properties share extremely similar surface forms, thus…

During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

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…

Language disorder is characterized by difficulty with the comprehension and production of different aspects of language. School-aged children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and school-aged children with Down syndrome (DS) demonstrate similar deficits in the area of morphosyntax, which often creates barriers during social interactions…

Based on data from numerous languages, such as English, Frisian, and Danish, Merchant (2001) proposes the "preposition stranding generalization" (PSG), which states that only languages that allow preposition stranding under wh-movement also allow preposition stranding under sluicing. The availability of this generalization has been the…

This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…

This article enters the debate about the complex and dynamical nature of second language acquisition (SLA) by discussing and commenting on Pallotti's critique of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). Pallotti's critique brings to the fore the argument that, due to its anti-reductionist stance, CDST research fails to observe three fundamental…

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…

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…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

Language is infinitely productive because syntax defines dependencies between grammatical categories of words and constituents, so there is interchangeability of these words and constituents within syntactic structures. Previous laboratory-based studies of language learning have shown that complex language structures like hierarchical center…

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern…