Purpose: Speech-language pathologists tailor language sample elicitation methods to the goals of the assessment and the needs of each child. In school-age children, narrative retell and expository contexts elicit more complex language than conversational contexts. However, the impact of elicitation context on younger children has been less…

Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word's meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping. But while formal…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child-directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We…

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…

It is by now well established that toddlers use the linguistic context in which a new word--and particularly a new verb--appears to discover aspects of its meaning. But what aspects of the linguistic context are most useful? To begin to investigate this, we ask how 2-year-olds use two sources of linguistic information that are known to be useful…

This study examines the role of a particular kind of linguistic input--talk about the past and future, pretend, and explanations, that is, talk that is decontextualized--in the development of vocabulary, syntax, and narrative skill in typically developing (TD) children and children with pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI). Decontextualized talk…

Decades of research have identified features of classrooms and teachers' talk that are associated with children's language growth. Unfortunately, much of this work has not yet translated to widespread practice in early childhood classrooms. Given the important contributions that early language development makes to later academic achievement,…

This study examines the effects of learning context and age on second language development by comparing the language gains, measured in terms of oral and written fluency, lexical and syntactic complexity, and accuracy, experienced by four groups of learners of English: children in a study abroad setting, children in their at-home school, adults in…

A set of predictions based on Reinhart's (1986) Theory of Relevance are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge. Pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge. (Contains 22…

Cross-linguistic borrowing (overt use of words from the other language) and transfer (use of semantic or syntactic structures from the other language without active switching to that language) were examined during language production in Russian-English bilinguals. Grammatical category (noun/verb) and level of concreteness were found to influence…

It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic…

Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically, researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively…

An obstacle in Natural Language understanding is the existence of lexical gaps, i.e. words or word senses that are not in the lexicon of the system. This thesis describes the implementation of MURRAY, a learning mechanism which infers the properties of a new lexical item from its syntactical environment and infers its meaning based on context and…