This dissertation is about the learnability of different generative, Separationist approaches to nominal morphosyntax. The core of my investigation is number, gender, and declension class, as manifested across nouns, adnominals (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and articles. An extreme position would require that all of…

We investigate concrete acquisition theories for a derived approach to linking theory development and explore to what extent two prominent linking theories in the syntactic literature--UTAH and rUTAH--can be derived from the data that English-learning children encounter. We leverage a conceptual acquisition framework that specifies key aspects of…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

Linguistic meaning is generated by the mind and can be expressed in multiple languages. One may assume that equivalent texts/utterances in two languages by means of translation generate equivalent meanings in their readers/hearers. This follows if we assume that meaning calculated from the linguistic input is solely objective in nature. However,…

The current study tests the hypothesis that language comprehension is, in part, influenced by language exposure, and the biases that people develop are related to the frequency of exposure to different linguistic input, like, for instance, pronoun coreference. As comprehenders filter the linguistic input they encounter, we ask, what is the impact…

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,…

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…

In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner's confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner's linguistic input. Crucially,…

We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

The interactionist hypothesis holds that conversational interaction facilitates second language (L2) learning by providing learners opportunities to receive meaningful input, modify their output, and attend to language form. Although research has often explored the efficacy of different types of L2 instruction (deductive or inductive), few studies…

Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for input-based language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children's (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents' use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child's use of inflectional affixes and their…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

Ambridge reviews and augments an impressive body of research demonstrating both the advantages and the necessity of an exemplar-based model of knowledge of one's language. He cites three computational models that have been applied successfully to issues of phonology and morphology. Focusing on Ambridge's discussion of sentence-level constructions,…

This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…