Parent input during interaction with young children varies across languages and contexts with regard to the relative number of words from different lexical categories, particularly nouns and verbs. Previous work has focused on spoken language input. Little is known about the lexical composition of parent input in American Sign Language (ASL). We…

From an early age, children apply the mutual exclusivity (ME) assumption, demonstrating preference for one-to-one mappings between words and their referents. However, for the acquisition of referentially overlapping terms, ME use must be suspended. We test whether contextual cues to intended meaning, in the form of presence of a speaker, may be…

The ability to judge the limits of one's own knowledge may play an important role in knowledge acquisition. The current study tested the prediction that preschoolers would judge the limits of their lexical knowledge more accurately if they were first exposed to a few objects of contrasting familiarity. Such preexposure was hypothesized to increase…

Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., "the dog chased the cat"). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., "that's the dog that chased…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract kind categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). How do children distinguish these distinct kinds of reference? We examined the role of one socio-pragmatic cue, namely pointing, in producing and comprehending generic versus particular…

This paper evaluates the proposal that general associative mechanisms underlie the earliest stages of word learning but that these same general mechanisms, operating over language input, enable children to identify domain-specific cues that ultimately help to constrain word learning, rendering children more sophisticated language users. As a…

This study is a systematic analysis of the information content of a wide range of distributional cues to word boundaries, individually and in combination, in naturally occurring child-directed speech across three languages (English, Polish, and Turkish). The paper presents a series of statistical analyses examining the relative predictive strength…