Given its complexity, abstractness, and central role in many logics, negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. Therefore, young children's gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a conceptual change that is necessary to represent logical meanings. However, it's also possible that expressing negation takes time…

Hidden structure refers to the units of organization that a child cannot directly observe when they are learning language (e.g. phonemes, morpheme boundaries, URs, phrases). In this dissertation, I propose a novel computational model that learns hidden structures in-tandem with the grammar. My model consists of two Maximum Entropy sub-models that…

Previous empirical research has shown that Portuguese children aged 4;0 to 6;0 are sensitive to the quality of stem-final vowels when acquiring the irregular plural forms of /l/-final words (acquisition order: plurals of /al, [epsilon]l, [Greek small reversed lunate sigma symbol]l, ul/ > plurals of /il/). This study presents a formal account of…

As an integral part of dynamic assessment, computerized dynamic assessment (CDA) offers learners computer-assisted automated mediation. Accordingly, the possible efficacy of corrective feedback seems to be enhanced with new technologies, such as artificial intelligence tools, that offer automatic corrective feedback. Using technology-enhanced…

Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Most children across the world learn to read and write in non-alphabetic orthographies such as abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas (e.g., Ethiopic Ge'ez), and morphosyllabaries (e.g., Chinese). However, most theories of reading, reading development, and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base of research in English--an outlier…

Benefits of self-testing for learning have been consistently shown for simple materials such as word lists learned by rote memorization. Considerably less evidence for such benefits exists for complex, more educationally relevant materials and its application to new situations. The present study explores the mechanisms underlying this transfer. To…

This article reviews conversation analytic research on explanations in pedagogical interaction, particularly in language learning classrooms. In reviewing this literature, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive account of what is interactionally involved when giving pedagogical explanations so that future research investigating the…

Purpose: The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard…

Language is crucial for adapting to society, and learning different languages enhances human efficiency. Learning a second language involves acquiring any language in addition to one's native language. Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has two meanings, generally, it describes the process of learning a second language, and more specifically, it…

Purpose: Disfluencies can be classified as stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) or typical disfluencies (TDs). Dividing TDs further, stalls (fillers and repetitions) are thought to be prospective, occurring due to planning glitches, and revisions (word and phrase revisions, word fragments) are thought to be retrospective, occurring when a speaker…

Previous research has established that children's experiences of language during in-person interactions (e.g. individual and cumulative experiences of structural choices) implicitly shape language learning. We investigated whether children also implicitly learn structural choices during online interactions, and whether this is affected by the…

Codeswitching has been used as a tool to investigate how the properties of the two language systems interact in the bilingual mind with relatively few studies investigating bilingual children. We target two groups of L1-Spanish-L2-English children in Spain to address language activation and language inhibition in the processing of codeswitching…

Interpreting a seemingly simple function word like "or," "behind," or "more" can require logical, numerical, and relational reasoning. How are such words learned by children? Prior acquisition theories have often relied on positing a foundation of innate knowledge. Yet recent neural-network-based visual question…