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Pablo E. Requena – Language Learning and Development, 2024
The well-known sampling limitation of most longitudinal corpus data can be even more consequential in the study of morphosyntactic variation in child language. An analysis of caregiver input suggests that variable use in overlapping contexts may be hard to find by solely relying on corpus data collected under the sampling procedures that are…
Descriptors: Morphology (Languages), Syntax, Language Acquisition, Language Variation
Koring, Loes; Giblin, Iain; Thornton, Rosalind; Crain, Stephen – First Language, 2020
This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Figurative Language, Syntax, Phrase Structure
Adger, David – First Language, 2020
The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…
Descriptors: Syntax, Figurative Language, Models, Generalization
Ambridge, Ben – First Language, 2020
In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b)…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Syntax, Computational Linguistics, Language Research
Messenger, Katherine; Hardy, Sophie M.; Coumel, Marion – First Language, 2020
The authors argue that Ambridge's radical exemplar account of language cannot clearly explain all syntactic priming evidence, such as inverse preference effects ("greater" priming for less frequent structures), and the contrast between short-lived lexical boost and long-lived abstract priming. Moreover, without recourse to a level of…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Syntax, Priming, Criticism
Naigles, Letitia R. – First Language, 2020
This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Longitudinal Studies, Grammar, Models
Hou, Lynn; Morford, Jill P. – First Language, 2020
The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…
Descriptors: Sign Language, Phrase Structure, American Sign Language, Syntax
Lantolf, James P.; Zhang, Xian – Language Learning, 2015
We respond here to Pienemann's critique of our study that appeared earlier this year in the Language Learning Special Issue entitled "Orders and Sequences in the Acquisition of L2 Morphosyntax, 40 Years On" and guest edited by Jan Hulstijn, Rod Ellis, and Søren Eskildsen. Pienemann objected to our claim that the Teachability Hypothesis…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Language Acquisition, Morphology (Languages), Syntax
Hopp, Holger – Second Language Research, 2014
This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue. Multiple Grammars advances the claim that optionality is a constitutive characteristic of any one grammar, with interlanguage grammars being perhaps the clearest examples of a…
Descriptors: Second Language Learning, Grammar, Linguistic Theory, Native Language
Butterworth, Brian – Language Learning and Development, 2012
What role does language play in developing the concept of number? This question is at the center of an important current debate. To try to answer it, one must first consider what is needed to learn number words and their meaning. First, the learner has to be able to identify number words as such, that is, to distinguish them from other sorts of…
Descriptors: Syntax, Number Concepts, Language Acquisition, Cognitive Ability
Unsworth, Sharon – Second Language Research, 2014
The central claim in Amaral and Roeper's (this issue; henceforth A&R) keynote article is that everyone is multilingual, whether they speak one or more languages. In a nutshell, the idea is that each speaker has multiple grammars or "sub-sets of rules (or sub-grammars) that co-exist". Thus, rather than positing complex rules to…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Linguistic Theory, Grammar, Second Language Learning
Lillo-Martin, Diane; Snyder, William – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2010
In English the nonfinite form is simply a bare verb, but in languages with a morphological distinction it usually takes the form of an infinitive. During the relevant stage the child, unlike an adult, sometimes uses an infinitive as the main verb of a root clause. Luigi Rizzi and certain other researchers therefore favor the term "root…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Young Children, Verbs, Syntax
Zamuner, Tania S. – Journal of Child Language, 2011
Within the subfields of linguistics, traditional approaches tend to examine different phenomena in isolation. As Stoel-Gammon (this issue) correctly states, there is little interaction between the subfields. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of language acquisition in general and, more specifically, lexical and phonological…
Descriptors: Phonology, Semantics, Nouns, Syntax
Thomason, Sarah G. – Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2011
Jurgen Meisel argues that "grammatical variation...can be described...in terms of parametric variation", and--crucially for his arguments in this paper--that "parameter settings do not change across the lifespan". To this extent he adopts the standard generative view, but he then departs from what he calls "the literature on historical…
Descriptors: Sociocultural Patterns, Diachronic Linguistics, Morphology (Languages), Syntax
Kohnert, Kathryn; Ebert, Kerry Danahy – Applied Psycholinguistics, 2010
In the Keynote Article, "The Interface Between Bilingual Development and Specific Language Impairment," Johanne Paradis considers issues and evidence at the intersection of children learning two languages and primary or specific language impairment (SLI). The review focuses on morphosyntactic evidence and the fit of this evidence with maturational…
Descriptors: Language Impairments, Profiles, Language Acquisition, Second Language Learning