Phonological models of early word learning often assume that child forms can be understood as structural mappings from their adult targets. In contrast, the whole-word phonology model suggests that on beginning word production children represent adult targets as holistic units, reflecting not the exact sound sequence but only the most perceptually…

Cross-linguistic studies describing the syllabic structures of babbling productions agree on the high prevalence of the CV structure, but few have addressed the other types of syllables emerging during this pre-linguistic stage. However, studying the evolution of the distribution of syllabic structures during babbling would make it possible to…

In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading)…

In a recent article published in this journal, Moscati and Crain (M&C) showcase the explanatory power of a learnability constraint called the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al. 1994). If correct, M&C's argument would represent a compelling demonstration of the operation of an innate, domain specific, learning principle. However,…

Shin and Mill (2021) propose four steps children go through when learning "variable form use." Although I applaud Shin and Miller's focus on morphosyntactic variation, their accrual of evidence is post hoc and selective. Fortunately, Shin and Miller recognize this and encourage tests of their ideas. In support of their work, I share data…

By 12 months of age, infants exhibit behavioral sensitivity to sound symbolism (e.g. sound-shape correspondences) when they hear universally sound symbolic pseudowords (e.g. "bouba," "kiki"). Here, we investigated whether infant's sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences is affected when they hear language-specific sound…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it -- removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use…

When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

This study investigated cross-linguistic priming in six-year-old, balanced Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 60). We examined bilinguals' production of transitive forms in English (active, passive) after exposure to Spanish transitives (Study 1; M age = 6.2 years; SD = 0.3) and their production of transitive forms in Spanish (active, passive) after…

Previous research has shown that an increased second language (L2) vocabulary size leads to better attunement to the cues required to distinguish L2 contrastive phones. This has been the central tenet of the vocabulary-tuning model (vocab) on the basis of evidence by Japanese learners of English in Australia. We aim to test the validity of the…

Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…

Non-tone language infants' native language recognition is based first on supra-segmental then segmental cues, but this trajectory is unknown for tone-language infants. This study investigated non-tone (English) and tone (Thai) language 6- to 10-month-old infants' preference for English vs. Thai one-syllable words (containing segmental and tone…

The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children's ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar…

Crosslinguistic research into language development reveals that typological features determine children's developmental patterns to a large extent. The present study examines the early morphological development in the verb inflectional paradigm in Bangla. Data from the first 6 months since the emergence of two-word combinations were collected from…