When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Collocations are understood to be integral building blocks of language processing, alongside individual words, but thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and…

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…

While it is possible to express the same meaning in different ways ('bread and butter' versus 'butter and bread'), we tend to say things in the same way. As much as half of spoken discourse is made up of "formulaic language" or linguistic patterns. Despite its prevalence, little is known about how the processing system treats novel…

Experimental studies show that children have greater difficulty with "wh"-extraction from object position than subject position, arguably an intervention effect (e.g., Relativized Minimality). In this study we provide additional evidence of a S/O asymmetry in A'-dependencies from a novel source--sluicing. The results of our first…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine the change in specific English microstructure features according to language ability in preschool Spanish-English dual language learners. Method: We collected English narratives from 22 Spanish-English dual language learners with typical language development (TD) and 22 Spanish-English dual language…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Children's sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous "wh"-questions like "Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?", they preferentially associate the "wh"-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g.,…

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N =…

The acoustic realization of phrasal prominence is proposed to correlate with the order of V(erbs) and O(bjects) in natural languages. The present production study with 15 talkers of Japanese (OV) and English (VO) investigates whether the speech signal contains coverbal visual information that covaries with auditory prosody, in Infant- and…

This paper investigates English-speaking children's acquisition of raising constructions (e.g. "John seems to Mary to be happy") and fnds an asymmetric effect of NP type on their comprehension: an improvement in performance is observed when a lexical NP is raised across a pronominal experiencer (e.g. "John seems to her to be…