Purpose: Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. This study asks whether such text…

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,…

Speech productions of 40 English- and 40 Japanese-speaking children (aged 2-5) were examined and compared with the speech produced by 20 adult speakers (10 speakers per language). Participants were recorded while repeating words that began with "s" and "sh" sounds. Clear language-specific patterns in adults' speech were found,…

In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…

Children with word finding difficulties (CwWFDs) are slower and less accurate at naming monomorphemic words than typically developing children (Dockrell, Messer & George, 2001), but their difficulty in naming morphologically complex words has not yet been investigated. One aim of this paper was to identify whether CwWFDs are similar to typically…

In a landmark study, Jusczyk and Aslin (1995 ) demonstrated that English-learning infants are able to segment words from continuous speech at 7.5 months of age. In the current study, we explored the possibility that infants segment words from the edges of utterances more readily than the middle of utterances. The same procedure was used as in…

Presents a hybrid ACT-R model that shows U-shaped learning of the English past tense without direct feedback, changes in vocabulary, or unrealistically high rates of regular verbs. Illustrates that the model can learn the default rule, even if regular forms are infrequent. Shows that the model can explore the question of why there is a distinction…

A model of the child's learning of the past tense forms of English verbs is discussed. This connectionist model takes as input a present-tense verb and provides as output a past tense form. A new simulation is applied to 13 problems raised by critics of the model, presented as fundamental flaws in the conceptualizations underlying connectionism.…

Children learn language by finding verbal expression for their immediate needs. Material wants, a desire to interact with others, and an impulse to explore their world are three dominant needs. (CK)

Presents the goals of the Plunkett and Marchman (PM) connectionist model of the acquisition of verb morphology, and responds to related criticisms. Claims that small vocabulary size allows young children to correctly produce both regular and irregular past tense forms, and that non-linearities in vocabulary growth are a contributing factor to the…

Focuses on nativist theories of language learning and how they apply to second-language acquisition (SLA). The article is seeking a nativism that goes beyond the scope of Universal Grammar and explains the human cognitive capacity for language learning, the learning of all language structures found in natural languages, and SLA. (95 references)…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

Presents two analyses of deviant phonological systems. The one based on production evidence alone accounts for (1) differences in surface behavior of a set of phonetic segments with three possible phoneme sources, and (2) obstruent clusters across morpheme boundaries. The "substitution analysis" identifies the child's underlying representations…

Describes a mispronunciation detection task, in which listeners' sensitivity to deviations in speech is measured by their pressing a button upon hearing a mispronounced word in lists or sentences. Notes that reaction times and miss rates indicate the effects of position of a misplaced phoneme in a word, the size of the phonemic deviation, lexical…