It has long been noted that verb phrase (VP) ellipsis cancels the polarity sensitivity of the English Positive Polarity Items (PPIs). In recent work, it has been proposed that words for disjunction are governed by a parameter. On one value of the parameter, disjunction is a PPI for adult speakers of many languages including Mandarin Chinese. On…

This study examines the expression of simultaneity in the film-based oral narratives of 100 English monolinguals in the following three age groups: preschoolers (4-6 years), school-aged children (7-10 years), and adults (19-48 years). Participants told a story of what happened in the film, in an off-line task, to an interviewer who had not seen…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

This article analyses how a set of psycholinguistic factors may account for children's lexical development. Age of acquisition is compared to a measure of lexical development based on vocabulary size rather than age, and robust regression models are used to assess the individual and joint effects of word class, frequency, imageability and…

Disambiguation refers to children's tendency to assign novel labels to unfamiliar rather than familiar referents. It is employed as a word-learning strategy, but it remains unknown whether it is a domain-specific phenomenon or a manifestation of more general pragmatic competence. To assess the domain-specificity and development of disambiguation,…

This study asks whether children accept both interpretations of ambiguous sentences with contexts supporting each option. Twenty-six 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children and a control group of 30 English-speaking adults participated in a truth value judgment task. As a step towards evaluating the complexity of syntactic ambiguity, the…

Prepositional phrases (PPs) are considered an important feature of mature written expression. However, little is known about the development of PPs during the school years. The study examined the use of PPs in 160 narrative and expository texts, written by Hebrew-users in grades 4, 7, and 11, and adults. PPs were identified, counted, and…