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Ailís Cournane; Mina Hirzel; Valentine Hacquard – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, Child Language, Definitions
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Babineau, Mireille; Havron, Naomi; Dautriche, Isabelle; de Carvalho, Alex; Christophe, Anne – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary Development, Language Processing
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Li, Daoxin; Schuler, Kathryn D. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive "-s," whereas the…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input, Artificial Languages, Learning Processes
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de Carvalho, Alex; Gomes, Victor; Trueswell, John – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…
Descriptors: English, Native Language, Language Acquisition, Classification
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Fedzechkina, Masha; Hall Hartley, Lucy; Roberts, Gareth – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
Language is subject to a variety of pressures. Recent work has documented that many aspects of language structure have properties that appear to be shaped by biases for the efficient communication of semantic meaning. Other work has investigated the role of social pressures, whereby linguistic variants can acquire positive or negative evaluation…
Descriptors: Social Bias, Semantics, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input
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Seref Can Esmer; Erim Kizildere; Tilbe Göksun – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2024
Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children's verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could…
Descriptors: Verbs, Parent Child Relationship, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input
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Angelopoulos, Nikos; Bagioka, Dafni-Vaia; Terzi, Arhonto – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others' authority or mental perspective, where "others" stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Morphology (Languages), Age Differences
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Howitt, Katherine; Dey, Soumik; Sakas, William Gregory – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner's confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner's linguistic input. Crucially,…
Descriptors: Linguistic Theory, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics, Guidelines
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Quam, Carolyn; Swingley, Daniel – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…
Descriptors: Error Patterns, Pronunciation, Vocabulary Development, Intonation
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Kennedy, Lynda; Romoli, Jacopo; Tieu, Lyn; Moscati, Vincenzo; Folli, Raffaella – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
Children have been reported to prefer the surface scope or "isomorphic" reading of scopally ambiguous sentences (Musolino 1998, among others). Existing accounts in the literature differ with respect to the proposed source of this "isomorphism effect." Some accounts are based on learnability considerations (e.g., Moscati &…
Descriptors: Aphasia, Preferences, Ambiguity (Context), Pragmatics
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Rastelli, Stefano – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…
Descriptors: Adults, Second Language Learning, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory
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Tesar, Bruce – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
The concept of an output-driven map formally characterizes an intuitive notion about phonology: that disparities between the input and the output are introduced only to the extent necessary to satisfy restrictions on outputs. When all of the grammars definable in a phonological system are output-driven, the implied structure provides significant…
Descriptors: Phonology, Language Research, Language Acquisition, Grammar
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Jesus, Alice; Marques, Rui; Santos, Ana Lúcia – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…
Descriptors: Semantics, Portuguese, Verbs, Preschool Children
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Pearl, Lisa – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…
Descriptors: Generative Grammar, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Computational Linguistics
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Davidson, Kathryn; Mayberry, Rachel I. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2015
Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Semantics, Pragmatics, Deafness
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