When speaking to young children, adults adapt their language to that of the child. In this article, we suggest that this child-directed speech (CDS) is the result of a transactional process of dynamic adaptation between the child and the adult. The study compares developmental trajectories of three children to those of the CDS of their caregivers.…

Laufer and Nation (1995) proposed that the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) can estimate the size of a second-language writer's productive vocabulary. Meara (2005) questioned the sensitivity and the reliability of LFPs for estimating vocabulary sizes, based on the results obtained from probabilistic simulations of LFPs. However, the underlying…

Language is a complex adaptive system: Speakers are agents who interact with each other, and their past and current interactions feed into speakers' future behavior in complex ways. In this article, we describe the social cognitive linguistic basis for this analysis of language and a mathematical model developed in collaboration between…

This article investigates how linguistic expressions of time--in particular, temporal adverbs and verb tense morphemes--are used to establish temporal reference at the level of brain physiology. First, a formal semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs is outlined. It is argued that computing temporal reference amounts to solving a…