This paper reports on a young Korean boy's target-like and non-target-like uses of the Korean negation marker "ani" to express various types of negation in Korean, observed approximately between the ages of 2;2 and 2;5. Besides the target-like usage of "ani" as a sentential adverb for a 'no' response, he used "ani" in…

This paper reports on a young Korean boy's target-like and non-target-like uses of the Korean negation marker "ani" to express various types of negation in Korean, observed approximately between the ages of 2;2 and 2;5. Besides the target-like usage of "ani" as a sentential adverb for a 'no' response, he used "ani" in…

It has long been believed across languages that the "Agent-First" strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

Previous papers in these pages have dealt empirically with the child's first words, the child's first imitations, and the use of yes/no and wh-questions with infants. In this study, we touch on all these issues, but attempt to place them in a systemic-functional language framework and a cultural-historical learning one. First, we deal with some of…

Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's…

One hypothesis to explain perceptual narrowing in speech perception is the distributional learning account. This account claims that both infants and adults are able to infer the number of phonemic categories through observations of frequency distributions of individual phones in their speech input (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002). Although the…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed…

How are languages learned, and to what extent are learning mechanisms similar in infant native-language (L1) and adult second-language (L2) acquisition? In terms of vocabulary acquisition, we know from the infant literature that the ability to discriminate similar-sounding words at a particular age does not guarantee successful word-meaning…

A promising source of insights into heritage language learning comes from the broader study of the role of input in language acquisition. We concentrate here on the possibility that qualitative differences in the proficiency of heritage and monolingual language learners can be traced to a qualitative difference in the input available to each…

Drawing on the psycholinguistic rationale and empirical research on output (e.g., [Izumi, S., 2002. "Output, input enhancement, and the noticing hypothesis: An experimental study on ESL relativization." "Studies in Second Language Acquisition" 24, 541-577; Izumi, S., Bigelow, M., 2000. "Does output promote noticing and second language…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous…

Understanding how words are created is potentially a key component to being able to learn and understand new vocabulary words. However, research on morphological awareness is relatively rare. In this study, over 660 preschool-aged children from three language groups (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean speakers) in which compounding morphology is…