In this commentary, I discuss why, despite the existence of gradience in phonetics and phonology, there is still a need for abstract representations. Most proponents of exemplar models assume multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for an integration of the gradient and the categorical. Ben Ambridge's dismissal of generative models such as…

We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

The generalisation of linguistic constructions is performed through analogical reasoning. Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) are impaired in analogical reasoning and in generalisation. However, these processes are improved by an input involving variability and similarity. Here we investigated the performance of children with or…

This study reports the results of a Give-X task investigating the comprehension of ordinal and cardinal numbers in monolingual Russian-speaking children. Data collected from 36 children between the ages of 4;06 and 5;10 provided evidence that Russian learners follow the well-attested pattern for cardinal acquisition, but that children use a…

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted…

Recently reported links between rhythm and grammar processing have opened new perspectives for using rhythm in clinical interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Previous research using the rhythmic priming paradigm has shown improved performance on language tasks after regular rhythmic primes compared to control…

Upon hearing a novel label, listeners tend to assume that it refers to a novel, rather than a familiar object. While this disambiguation or mutual exclusivity (ME) effect has been robustly shown across development, it is unclear what it involves. Do listeners use their pragmatic and lexical knowledge to exclude the familiar object and thus select…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

Bilingual infants must navigate the similarities and differences between their languages to achieve native proficiency in childhood. Bilinguals learning to find individual words in fluent speech face the possibility of conflicting cues to word boundaries across their languages. Despite this challenge, bilingual infants typically begin to segment…

Configurations of support include those that exhibit Support-From-Below (cup "on" table), as well as those involving Mechanical Support (e.g., stamp "on" envelope, coat "on" hook). Mature language users show a "division of labor" in the encoding of support, frequently using basic locative expressions (BE…

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…

In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

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…