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Schuler, Kathryn D.; Kodner, Jordan; Caplan, Spencer – First Language, 2020
In 'Against Stored Abstractions,' Ambridge uses neural and computational evidence to make his case against abstract representations. He argues that storing only exemplars is more parsimonious -- why bother with abstraction when exemplar models with on-the-fly calculation can do everything abstracting models can and more -- and implies that his…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics, Linguistic Theory
Celina Agostinho; Anna Gavarró; Ana Lúcia Santos – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2025
This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…
Descriptors: Verbs, Grammar, Portuguese, Language Universals
Syrett, Kristen; Aravind, Athulya – Journal of Child Language, 2022
Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their…
Descriptors: Semantics, Context Effect, Nouns, Language Processing
Song, Yusi – English Language Teaching, 2020
Metaphors and similes have been treated as the same comparable types of figurative speech since Aristotle. In early theories, metaphors are interpreted as corresponding similes by paraphrasing. Based on this theoretical framework, some experimental studies interpret simile understanding as evidence for metaphor understanding. However, according to…
Descriptors: Figurative Language, Comparative Analysis, Language Usage, Linguistic Theory
Polišenská, Kamila; Chiat, Shula; Szewczyk, Jakub; Twomey, Katherine E. – Journal of Child Language, 2021
Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…
Descriptors: Semantics, Language Processing, Linguistic Theory, Syntax
Lieven, Elena; Ferry, Alissa; Theakston, Anna; Twomey, Katherine E. – First Language, 2020
During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Children, Generalization, Abstract Reasoning
Megan Gotowski – ProQuest LLC, 2022
How do children learn the meaning of words like "pretty" and "tall," which are not only gradable and context dependent (Kennedy & McNally 2005), but encode speaker subjectivity? Despite their complex semantics (Stephenson 2007; Lasersohn 2009; Bylinina 2014), these and other adjectives like them, are some of the most…
Descriptors: Linguistic Theory, Semantics, Language Acquisition, Language Processing
Jones, Samuel David; Westermann, Gert – Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2021
Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental…
Descriptors: Neurosciences, Cognitive Processes, Prediction, Language Processing
Koring, Loes; Giblin, Iain; Thornton, Rosalind; Crain, Stephen – First Language, 2020
This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Figurative Language, Syntax, Phrase Structure
Martelle, Stefanie N.; Namazi, Mahchid – Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 2022
Purpose: The aim of this review is to illuminate the connection between inferential skills and spoken language idiom comprehension (SLIC) with a focus on autism. Idioms are frequently occurring figurative expressions, such as feeling blue, on cloud nine, and all tied up, that have literal and nonliteral meanings. Method: In this review article, an…
Descriptors: Figurative Language, Correlation, Speech Communication, Pervasive Developmental Disorders
Wang, Shuyan – Language Learning and Development, 2023
Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Mandarin Chinese, English, Short Term Memory
Markovits Rojas, Jennifer Rosanna – ProQuest LLC, 2023
Study 1: The present work examined the connection between language and conceptual development, investigating whether false-belief reasoning (FBR) and source-monitoring ability (SMA) abilities within the theory of mind (ToM) framework constrained the comprehension of semantic and pragmatic knowledge (evidential scalar implicatures) encoded in the…
Descriptors: Bilingualism, American Indian Languages, Theory of Mind, Foreign Countries
Dudschig, Carolin; Kaup, Barbara; Liu, Mingya; Schwab, Juliane – Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2021
Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Morphemes, Psycholinguistics, Semantics
Pagliarini, Elena; Crain, Stephen; Guasti, Maria Teresa – Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2018
This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…
Descriptors: Italian, Psycholinguistics, Form Classes (Languages), Semantics
Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C.; Pérez-Tattam, Rocío S.; Stadthagen-González, Hans; Laporte, Nadine I.; Thomas, Enlli M. – International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2019
This study examined Spanish-Welsh (in Patagonia) and Welsh-English (in North Wales) bilingual children's and adults' processing of sentences in which two noun phrases acted as arguments of a verb. The goal was to determine the relative importance of distinct cues to the identification of the subject in the bilinguals' processing of their two…
Descriptors: Spanish, Welsh, English, Bilingualism