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Learning to Predict and Predicting to Learn: Before and beyond the Syntactic Bootstrapper
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Babineau, Mireille; Havron, Naomi; Dautriche, Isabelle; de Carvalho, Alex; Christophe, Anne – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2023
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Vocabulary Development, Language Processing
The Acquisition of "Wh"-Questions: Beyond Structural Economy and Input Frequency
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Nguyen, An D.; Legendre, Geraldine – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Language Acquisition, Questioning Techniques, Preschool Children
The Effects of Language Input on Word Order in German as a Heritage and Majority Language
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Sopata, Aldona; Dlugosz, Kamil – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2022
This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input--including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input--affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, German, Word Order, Bilingualism
Ambiguity, Parsing, and the Evaluation Measure
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Fodor, Janet Dean – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
An evaluation measure (EM) guides a learner's choice of grammar when more than one is compatible with available input. EM must be universal, so children receiving comparable input acquire comparable grammars. It must favor the choices children actually make. The theoretical shift from rule-based grammars to principles-and-parameter-based grammars…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar
Input-Driven Differences in Toddlers' Perception of a Disappearing Phonological Contrast
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van der Feest, Suzanne V. H.; Johnson, Elizabeth K. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
How does phonological development differ in children exposed to one versus two variants of a single language? If children receive mixed evidence for a phonological contrast (i.e., one language variant in the environment maintains a contrast while another neutralizes it), will they treat this contrast as noncontrastive (i.e., as allophonic)? Or…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Toddlers, Indo European Languages, Language Variation
Children's Interpretation of Disjunction in Negative Sentences: A Comparison of Turkish and German
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Geçkin, Vasfiye; Thornton, Rosalind; Crain, Stephen – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2018
This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (English or) in negative sentences by Turkish- and German-speaking children. Both children and adults were asked to judge Turkish/German sentences corresponding to the English sentence "This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper." Children acquiring both languages…
Descriptors: Contrastive Linguistics, Turkish, Language Acquisition, German
Linking Parser Development to Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge
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Omaki, Akira; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2015
Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Linguistic Input
Structural Priming as Learning: Evidence from Mandarin-Learning 5-Year-Olds
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Hsu, Dong-Bo – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2014
Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-"ba" alternation. The first two…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Syntax, Priming, Language Processing
Syntactic Islands and Learning Biases: Combining Experimental Syntax and Computational Modeling to Investigate the Language Acquisition Problem
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Pearl, Lisa; Sprouse, Jon – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2013
The induction problems facing language learners have played a central role in debates about the types of learning biases that exist in the human brain. Many linguists have argued that some of the learning biases necessary to solve these language induction problems must be both innate and language-specific (i.e., the Universal Grammar (UG)…
Descriptors: Logical Thinking, Syntax, Brain, Learning Strategies
A Large-Scale Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Acquisition of Passive
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Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Haman, Ewa; de López, Kristine Jensen; Smoczynska, Magdalena; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Szczerbinski, Marcin; van Hout, Angeliek; Dabašinskiene, Ineta; Gavarró, Anna; Hobbs, Erin; Kamandulyte-Merfeldiene, Laura; Katsos, Napoleon; Kunnari, Sari; Nitsiou, Chrisa; Olsen, Lone Sundahl; Parramon, Xavier; Sauerland, Uli; Torn-Leesik, Reeli; van der Lely, Heather – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2016
This cross-linguistic study evaluates children's understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and…
Descriptors: Language Research, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Language Acquisition