A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A…

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

Since its first adoption as a computational model for language learning, evidence has accumulated that Rescorla-Wagner error-correction learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) captures several aspects of language processing. Whereas previous studies have provided general support for the Rescorla-Wagner rule by using it to explain the behavior of…

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…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

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…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children's acquisition of "wh"-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 "wh"-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of "wh"-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

We examine the second language (L2) acquisition of variable Spanish word order by first language (L1) speakers of English via the acquisition of unaccusative and transitive predicates in various focus-related contexts. We employ two bimodal linguistic tasks: (1) acceptability judgment task (B-AJT) and (2) appropriateness preference task (B-APT).…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

Research suggests that second language words are learned faster when they are similar in phonological structure or accent to the words of an individual's first language. Many major theories suggest this happens because of differences in frequency of exposure and context between first and second language words. Here, we examine the independent…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…