Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether young French-learning children (N = 76) are able to use a single number cue in subject-verb agreement contexts and match a visually dynamic scene with a corresponding verbal stimulus. Results from both preferential looking and pointing demonstrated significant comprehension in…

Recent accounts of language acquisition propose that the knowledge structures that comprise language develop within a single, unified system that shares computational resources and representations. One implication of this approach is that developmental relations within the system become central to theorizing about language acquisition. Previous…

Educational media serve as informal educators within the home by supplementing young children's development. Substantial evidence documents the contributions of educational television to preschoolers' acquisition of a variety of skills; however, television's natural capacity as storyteller and the role it plays in preschoolers' early literacy…

This article reports on a series of 5 analyses of spontaneous production of verbal inflection (tense and person-number agreement) by 2-year-olds acquiring French as a native language. A formal analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results is developed using the unique resources of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004). It is…

Infants' phonological acquisition during the first 18 months of life has been studied within experimental psychology for some 30 years. Current research themes include statistical learning mechanisms, early lexical development, and models of phonetic category perception. So far, linguistic theories have hardly been taken into account. These…

The claim that children's early word combinations are best described in terms of semantic categories such as agent, rather than abstract categories such as subject, rests on the assumption that 2-year-olds have a notion of agency that acts as a springboard for knowledge of more formal categories. The literature of developmental psychology suggests…

A fundamental problem in language acquisition is determining how children learn the formal vocabulary of the adult grammar. A proposed solution is the Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SBH), which states that children infer the identity of syntactic entities such as "subject" in input based on the presence of semantic entities such as…

The collection of papers on language development and African-American children includes: "The Challenges of Conducting Language Research with African American Children" (Holly K. Craig); "Issues in Recruiting African American Participants for Research" (Joyce L. Harris); "Issues in Assessing the Language Abilities of…