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's sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous "wh"-questions like "Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?", they preferentially associate the "wh"-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g.,…

A crucial human cognitive goal is to understand and to be understood. But understanding often takes active management. Two studies investigated early developmental processes of understanding management by focusing on young children's comprehension monitoring. We ask: When and how do young children actively monitor their comprehension of…

This paper details the motivation for and the main characteristics of "An Scéalaí" ('The Storyteller'), an intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (iCALL) platform for autonomous learning that integrates the four skills; writing, listening, speaking, and reading. A key feature is the incorporation of speech technology. Speech…

We present a new feedback strategy implemented in a natural language generation-based e-learning system for German as a second language (L2). Although the system recognizes a large proportion of the grammar errors in learner-produced written sentences, its automatically generated feedback only addresses errors against rules that are relevant at…

Examined the effect of linguistic contrast in children's learning of color names. A novel color term for a stimulus color that was contrasted with a child's label helped five-year olds learn the new term. When the contrast was presented more than once, three- and four-year olds performed much like the five-year olds. (BC)