This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…

People differ in the size of their social network, and thus in the properties of the linguistic input they receive. This article examines whether differences in social network size influence individuals' linguistic skills in their native language, focusing on global comprehension of evaluative language. Study 1 exploits the natural variation in…

Language attrition research has developed in several clearly delimited phases spanning, roughly, each of the three decades between 1982 and 2012 (see Kopke & Schmid 2004 for a more detailed overview and analysis). The first phase was an era of stocktaking, with a number of symposia, collected volumes and special issues of journals. All of…

THIS STUDY WAS DESIGNED TO INVESTIGATE THE SPECIFIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TYPE OF BILINGUALISM (COMPOUND OR COORDINATE) AND THE ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION AND LISTENING SKILLS OF NATIVE SPEAKERS OF SPANISH. THIRTY-SIX STUDENTS FROM VARIOUS PARTS OF LATIN AMERICA WHO WERE COMPLETING A TEN-WEEK COLLEGE PREPARATORY "ENGLISH ORIENTATION" COURSE AT LOUISIANA…

This article describes the role of lexical acquisition in stuttering by examining the research on word learning and interactions between semantics and syntax in typically developing children and children who stutter. The potential effects of linguistic mismatches, or dysynchronies in language skills, on the possible onset and development of…

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, Tomasello (2000) suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of…

Relationships between "combinatorial" abilities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and non-semantic action sequences were explored in a study of 30 infants between 82 and 91 weeks of age. Subjects were observed in a laboratory playroom setting for approximately 45 minutes. During this time, a number of tasks were administered…

Three experiments investigated the nature of productive forward linking (from semantics to syntax) and productive reverse linking (from syntax to semantics) in language-impaired children. Found that the normally developing control subjects showed a good use of productive forward and reverse linking, whereas the language-impaired subjects…

Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

The ways in which preschoolers use the word "but" were studied. It was found that the eight preschoolers, who ranged in age from 3;9 to 5;5, were able to use "but" to express a number of different types of adversative relationships. "But" introduced clauses containing information that: (1) contrasted with shared knowledge about the usual state of…

THIS 7-YEAR LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE LANGUAGE SKILLS OF 338 OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, SCHOOL CHILDREN UTILIZES A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF BOTH THE SEMANTIC AND STRUCTURAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE. A SPECIFIC METHOD OF LANGUAGE ANALYSIS HAS BEEN SHAPED. THE "SEGMENTATION" METHOD OF ANALYSIS USES SEVERAL TYPES OF SENTENCE SEGMENTS. A…

This volume discusses some of the language-related factors involved in bilingual education. The first paper surveys the major results and current research topics in the field of syntax, with an emphasis on how they might be of relevance to bilingual education. The first part of the article gives an overview on the nature of the field of syntax,…

Two English-speaking six-year-olds attending a French-speaking kindergarten in Montreal were tested for the content of their French L2 (second language) utterances. An adaptation of the mean length of utterance (MLU) index was used to judge the order of acquisition in the encoding of semantic-syntactic relations in the second language. The same…

Nouns are generally recalled and recognized better in memory tasks, although several theoretical positions and a variety of empirical tasks indicate the importance of verbs to sentences. To try to resolve this paradox, several experiments were designed to explore the efficiency of various sentence elements as cues in recognition memory. Subjects…