The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

The current study examined preschool children's ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, "every" and "no." When "no" precedes "every," the entailment pattern typically licensed by "every" changes, but only if "no"…

We study the learnability problem concerning the dative alternations in English (Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989). We consider how first language learners productively apply the double-object and to-dative constructions ("give the book to library"/"give the library the book"), while excluding negative exceptions ("donate the…

We present a hierarchical Bayesian framework for modeling the acquisition of verb argument constructions. It embodies a domain-general approach to learning higher-level knowledge in the form of inductive constraints (or overhypotheses), and has been used to explain other aspects of language development such as the shape bias in learning object…

A descriptive model is proposed for the study of the communication interactions between a child and the language users around him, based upon a means to record and analyze the adult demands placed upon the child. (Author)

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

Thirteen papers in this book illustrate MacWhinney and Bates's Competition Model (CM), with a focus on cross-linguistic processing. Studies in this volume show that (1) the CM is useful in predicting certain gross cross-linguistic differences of comprehension, particularly in relation to actor assignment and (2) children's processing strategies…

Explores the prospects for a "general nativist" theory of first- and second-language acquisition (SLA), outlines a modular acquisition device not including Universal Grammar, and considers the role of universal grammar in the emergence of a first language (L1). (50 references) (Author/CK)

Examines research on the interpretation of ambiguous sentences and the presence or absence of contextual override effects. This study also examines the requirements placed on computational models of word-by-word incremental processing. The emerging picture is of a multiple constraint-based system in which knowledge ranging from lexical through…

The purpose of this study was to explore whether 13 children with specific language impairment (SLI; ages 5;1-8;0 [years;months]) were as proficient as typically developing age- and vocabulary-matched children in the production of finite and nonfinite complement clauses. Preschool children with SLI have marked difficulties with verb-related…

A discussion of English-speaking children's use of subjectless sentences contrasts the competence and performance explanations for the phenomenon. In particular, it reviews evidence indicating that the phenomenon does not reflect linguistic competence, but rather performance constraints. A tentative model of children's production is presented…

Research on the grammatical cues that guide comprehension of a language and that children are most sensitive to, particularly in Hebrew, is reviewed as an introduction to the first phase of a study conducted with 20 native Hebrew-speaking children aged 4 to 9 in southern California and a group of adults to provide comparative data. The study…

A model for helping classroom teachers understand and evaluate the growth of children in oral and written compositions is presented. The recommended procedure is centered around T-unit analysis. The following sequence is one possible way the T-unit analysis procedure might be used by an elementary school teacher: (1) Divide all the sentences of a…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

The role of syntactic/semantic structure in the motor programing of speech by five-year-olds, eight-year-olds, and adults was investigated. Repetition durations were found to be shorter for simple than for complex sentences at all ages. However, linguistic complexity affected durational variability only for adults. (Author/SED)