I argue that the variation within and across contexts detailed by Shin & Miller is indicative of a broader phenomenon in which morphosyntax and the discourse context are intertwined, including elements like perspective, discourse relations, information structure, and common ground. Appealing to independent evidence highlighting the role of…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

Despite the growing body of integrationist literature on the study of language and on a wide range of language-related fields of inquiry, there is as yet no integrationist investigation of the field of language acquisition. This paper argues for the need of an integrationist study of what children learn about language and of how they learn it.…

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four…

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this "distributed learning effect" with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children…

A discussion of the role of linguistic theory in explaining language acquisition proposes that theory draws too narrow a picture of language to adequately account for the developmental phenomena of acquisition. While recognizing the importance of descriptive linguistic research, a new approach cautions against embracing description to the…

It is proposed that, in contrast to Chomsky's argument, it is possible to arrive at an empirically grounded definition of innate linguistic competence that guides the child in the construction of grammar, particularly when this process is viewed as developmental. This approach treats language acquisition as a process of change. It is suggested…

Research with 24 infants revealed that reduplication is a general pattern during the earliest stages of phonological development, used most frequently by children who follow a multisyllabic rather than monosyllabic course of development. (Author)

This report on research in progress explores criteria for lexical innovation in children. Children, like adults, make use of a principle of conventionality (each word has one or more conventional meanings) and one of contrast (the conventional meanings of every two words contrast). Like adults, children coin words to fill lexical gaps, and they do…

This article discusses an attempt to establish a model of the cognitive strategies used by a child in the acquisition of nouns and the stages in the process of categorizing reality. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

A very basic feature of learning is the translation of what is heard or seen into a form that can be sotred in memore. This process of translation will be considered in relation to reception and as a possible cause of differences in learning performance. (Author)

Suggests that even the youngest children use systematic strategies in ordering the elements of a story based on causal and temporal relationships. (FL)

The development of plurals in two German-speaking children was analyzed, based on observational data. It was argued that the children were learning plurals by rote, conditioned by morphological complexity which cannot be subsumed under any general rule. (Author/NCR)