This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children…

A central question in language acquisition is how children build linguistic representations that allow them to generalize verbs from one construction to another (e.g., "The boy gave a present to the girl" ? "The boy gave the girl a present"), whilst appropriately constraining those generalizations to avoid non-adultlike errors…

Gestures and vocal elements interact from the early stages of language development, but the role of this interaction in the language learning process is not yet completely understood. The aim of this study is to explore gestural accompaniment's influence on the acoustic properties of vocalizations in the transition to first words. Eleven Spanish…

Children are thought to learn second languages (L2s) using primarily implicit mechanisms, in contrast to adults, who primarily rely on explicit language learning. This difference is usually attributed to cognitive maturation, but adults also receive more explicit instruction than children, which may influence their learning strategies. This study…

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an…

There is a noted advantage of dense neighborhoods in language acquisition, but the learning mechanism that drives the effect is not well understood. Two hypotheses--long-term auditory word priming and phonological working memory--have been advanced in the literature as viable accounts. These were evaluated in two treatment studies enrolling twelve…

This study tested whether bilingual children show a lag in semantic development (the schematic-categorical shift) relative to monolingual children due to smaller vocabularies within a language. Twenty French-English bilingual and twenty English monolingual children (seven to ten years old) participated in a picture-naming task in English. Their…

This study investigates the acquisition of word-initial Korean obstruents (i.e. stops, affricates and fricatives). Korean obstruents are characterized by a three-way contrast among stops and affricates (i.e. fortis, aspirated and lenis) and a two-way fricative contrast (i.e. fortis and lenis). All these obstruents are voiceless word-initially.…

Stoel-Gammon (this issue) states that "from birth to age 2 ; 6, the developing phonological system affects lexical acquisition to a greater degree than lexical factors affect phonological development" (this issue). This conclusion is based on a wealth of data; however, the available data are somewhat limited in scope, focusing on rather holistic…

This paper sets out to show how facilitation between different clause structures operates over time in syntax acquisition. The phenomenon of facilitation within given structures has been widely documented, yet inter-structure facilitation has rarely been reported so far. Our findings are based on the naturalistic production corpora of six toddlers…

We present a hierarchical Bayesian framework for modeling the acquisition of verb argument constructions. It embodies a domain-general approach to learning higher-level knowledge in the form of inductive constraints (or overhypotheses), and has been used to explain other aspects of language development such as the shape bias in learning object…

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A[right arrow]AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A[right arrow]AB). The children in…

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study examining the acquisition of the English voice system by a three-year-old native speaker of Dutch. The study aims to examine whether the child develops two different phonetic systems or uses just one system for both languages, and compares the early L2 acquisition process with L1,…

The study investigates the development of English multiword negation, in particular the negation of zero marked verbs (e.g. "no sleep", "not see", "can't reach") from a usage-based perspective. The data was taken from a dense database consisting of the speech of an English-speaking child (Brian) aged 2;3-3;4 (MLU 2.05-3.1) and his mother. The…

Research with 24 infants revealed that reduplication is a general pattern during the earliest stages of phonological development, used most frequently by children who follow a multisyllabic rather than monosyllabic course of development. (Author)