Multisyllabic words constitute a large portion of children's vocabulary. However, the relationship between phonological neighborhood density and English multisyllabic word learning is poorly understood. We examine this link in three, four and six year old children using a corpus-based approach. While we were able to replicate the well-accepted…

The relationship between emotion and language in children is an emerging field of research. To carry out this type of study, researchers need to precisely manipulate the emotional parameters of the words in their experimental material. However, the number of affective norms for words in this population is still limited. To fill this gap, the…

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…

Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…

This study tested the impact of child-directed language input on language development in Spanish-English bilingual infants (N = 25, 11- and 14-month-olds from the Seattle metropolitan area), across languages and independently for each language, controlling for socioeconomic status. Language input was characterized by social interaction variables,…

Young English-speaking children often produce utterances with missing 3sg -s (e.g., *He play). Since the mid 1990s, such errors have tended to be treated as Optional Infinitive (OI) errors, in which the verb is a non-finite form (e.g., Wexler, 1998; Legate & Yang, 2007). The present article reports the results of a cross-sectional…

This dissertation explores parallels between Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Determiner Phrase (DP) semantics, syntax, and morphology--including similarities in case-assignment, subject-verb and possessor-possessum agreement, subject and possessor semantics, and overall syntactic structure--in first language acquisition. Applying theoretical…

The present study examines the association of micro- and macrostructural components in narrative retells within and across languages in Spanish-English bilingual Latino kindergarten children. Using a within-subject research design, fourteen Spanish-English speaking Latino kindergarten children were individually read a scripted picture book, after…

For the 5 million low-income Latino children in the United States who are disproportionately impacted by the numerous risk factors associated with poverty, it is essential to identify proximal protective factors that mitigate these risks and bolster the academic and social skills that are foundational to a successful transition into formal…

Studies of connected speech have repeatedly shown that the contextual predictability of a word is related to its phonetic duration; more predictable words tend to be produced with shorter duration, when other factors are controlled for (Aylett & Turk, 2004, 2006; Bell et al., 2003; Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Gahl,…

For professionals working with multilingual children, detecting language deficits in a child's home language can present a challenge. This is largely due to the scarcity of standardized assessments in many children's home languages and missing normative data on multilingual language acquisition. A common approach is to translate existing English…

This study investigated the motion event language children and their parents engaged in while playing a board game. Children are sensitive to differences in manner and path at infancy, yet adult-like motion event expression appears relatively late in development. While multiple studies have examined how exposure to parent speech generally relates…

Acquisition of regular inflectional suffixes is an integral part of grammatical development in English and delayed acquisition of certain inflectional suffixes is a hallmark of language impairment. We investigate the relationship between input frequency and grammatical suffix acquisition, analyzing 217 transcripts of mother-child (ages 1 ; 11-6 ;…

Research using online comprehension measures with monolingual children shows that speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are correlated with lexical development. Here we examined speech processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary development in bilingual children learning both Spanish and English (n=26 ; 2 ; 6). Between-language…

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in…