During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

Scalar implicatures (SIs) lie at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and therefore have evoked great interest for language acquisition research. Many acquisition studies show that young children know the literal semantics of scalar items (like "some", "might", "start" and "or") but have…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

Organized semantic networks reflecting distinctions within and across domains of knowledge are critical for higher-level cognition. Thus, understanding how semantic structure changes with experience is a fundamental question in developmental science. This study probed changes in semantic structure in 4-6 year-old children (N = 29) as a result of…

In typical development, listeners can use semantic content of verbs to facilitate incremental language processing--a skill that is associated with existing language skills. Studies of children with ASD have not identified an association between incremental language processing in semantically-constraining contexts and language skills, perhaps…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

This dissertation explores the effects of frequency on the learning and use of linguistic constructions. The work examines the influence of frequency on form choice in production and meaning inference in comprehension and discusses the effect of each modality on diachronic patterns of change in language. In production, high frequency of a form…

This study examined early Hebrew verb acquisition, highlighting CDS-CS relations across inflectional and derivational verb learning. It was carried out on a corpus of longitudinal dense dyadic interactions of two Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1;8-2;2 and their parents. Findings revealed correlated patterns within and between CDS and CS corpora in…

Purpose: Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic…

Purpose: Early language difficulties are associated with later internalizing problems across different ages and for different aspects of language. The mechanisms behind this association are, however, less understood. In the current study, we investigated longitudinal associations between language difficulties at 5 years and internalizing problems…

Background: We adopted a theoretical framework that the acquisition of a scientific concept comprises the development of connections among conceptual elements associated with a scientific term within a mental semantic network. Given this framework, the hypothesis that the surrounding words connected with a scientific term are relevant to the…

Language development requires children to learn how to understand ambiguous pronouns, as in "Panda Bear is having lunch with Puppy. He wants a pepperoni slice." Adults tend to link "he" with Puppy, the prior grammatical subject, but young children either fail to exhibit this bias (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt & Trueswell, 2007) or…

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated…

The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…