We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

How do children learn the meaning of words like "pretty" and "tall," which are not only gradable and context dependent (Kennedy & McNally 2005), but encode speaker subjectivity? Despite their complex semantics (Stephenson 2007; Lasersohn 2009; Bylinina 2014), these and other adjectives like them, are some of the most…

In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner's confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner's linguistic input. Crucially,…

Multilingualism presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Natural Language Processing, with code-switching representing a particularly interesting problem for computational models trained on monolingual datasets. In this paper, we explore how code-switched data affects the task of Machine Translation, a task which only recently has started…

This study elicited and analyzed all the Chinese and English interrogatives from the Singapore Early Child Mandarin Corpus (132 children aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6) to examine the effects and predictors of early bilingual development in Singapore preschoolers. The results indicated that: (1) there was significant age (but not gender) effect in…

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire…

This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…

This article uses the clitic left dislocation (CLLD) construction in L2 Spanish to investigate whether generative SLA has valuable insights to contribute to language teaching. Although CLLD is a structure that is commonly used by native speakers, as reported anecdotally and in at least one corpus, we found that native-Spanish and native-English…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are prone to personal pronoun difficulties. This article investigates maternal input as a potential contributing factor, focusing on an early developmental stage before ASD diagnosis. Using Quigley and McNally's corpus of maternal speech to infants (3-19 months; N = 19) who are either at high or low…

Syntactic structures are unobserved theoretical constructs which are useful in explaining a wide range of linguistic and psychological phenomena. Language acquisition studies how such latent structures are acquired by human learners through many hypothesized learning mechanisms and apparatuses, which can be genetically endowed or of general…

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed "Jastudy," a…

Discourse markers (DMs) are significant for fluent speech. Furthermore, they are essential elements of language for conversation organisation, reciprocal relation of interlocutors, productive speaking and comprehension. Although they have critical functions for pragmatic development, they are neglected in language teaching either because of the…

This study examined the acquisition of a linguistic property that is underrepresented in the input available to second language (L2) learners, namely, interpretation of French strong pronouns as [-animate]. To understand how pronouns are used and interpreted and how this topic is treated in pedagogical grammars, three types of analyses were…