Emotion words allow us to identify, describe and regulate our emotional states. Emotion vocabulary grows through childhood, but little research has considered emotion words in the context of children's written language. To address this gap, we used a cross-corpus developmental approach to chart the emergence of emotion words in children's reading…

Studies have shown that iconicity can provide a benefit to non-signers during the learning of single signs, but other aspects of signed messages that might also be beneficial have received less attention. In particular, do other features of signed languages help support comprehension of a message during the process of language learning? The…

The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others' authority or mental perspective, where "others" stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the…

The inflectional diversity of parents' speech directed to children acquiring Dutch was investigated. Inflectional diversity is defined as the number of inflected forms of a particular lemma (e.g. singular, plural of a noun) and measured by means of Mean Size of Paradigm (MSP). Changes in the inflectional diversity of infant directed speech (IDS)…

The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

"Wh"-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English "what") and an indefinite (like English "a/some") interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring…

This paper aims to discuss old and contemporary perspectives in understanding language acquisition taking into account the neural theory of language. Discussing a recent theory by Kuhl (2010), neural substrates of first language learning will be put forward (Berwick et al., 2013). Neural substrates of phonetic learning, word learning, sentence…

Naming semantically related images results in progressively slower responses as more images are named. There is considerable documentation in adults of this phenomenon, known as cumulative semantic interference. Few studies have focused on this phenomenon in children. The present research investigated cumulative semantic interference effects in…

Children often hear many new words in one conversation, and yet word learning research overwhelmingly focuses on how children learn and retrieve the meanings of single words. The current experiment tests how the number of labeled objects affects preschoolers' novel word referent selection immediately after encoding and after a one-week delay.…

Idiomatics, the scientific study of idiomatic and figurative language, is examined in this article to define the boundaries as a distinct academic discipline. The investigation highlights the significant implications of idiomatics for understanding human behavior, language development, and technological advancements. A sixpart approach to language…

In order to learn the mappings from words to referents, children must integrate co-occurrence information across individually ambiguous pairs of scenes and utterances, a challenge known as cross-situational word learning. In machine learning, recent multimodal neural networks have been shown to learn meaningful visual-linguistic mappings from…

Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and…