This dissertation interrogates the representation of syntactic locality constraints, specifically intervention locality, within child grammar. Our focal point is the Intervention Hypothesis, which suggests that children are governed by a strict version of featural Relativized Minimality, leading to comprehension difficulties when partial featural…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

For children, Object Relative (OR) clauses can be late acquired across a number of languages (e.g., this is the goat that the cows are pushing), and production of non-standard ORs that include resumption is often attested (e.g., Italian; French; English). In addition, starting at age 6, children start adopting passive subject relatives (SRs)…

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…

Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that…

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…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

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,…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

In English, the sentence "Mary didn't eat pizza or sushi" is assigned the "neither interpretation" (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative…

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…

Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately…

Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…