Purpose: This study examines online speech processing in typically developing and late-talking 2-year-old children, comparing both groups' word recognition, word prediction, and word learning. Method: English-acquiring U.S. children, from the "When to Worry" study of language and social--emotional development, were identified as typical…

In discourses involving implicit causality, the implicit cause of the event is referentially predictable, that is, it is likely to be rementioned. However, it is unclear how referential predictability is calculated. We test two possible explanations: (1) The frequency account suggests that people learn that implicit causes are predictable through…

Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's…

People often speak ambiguously, as in the case of "indirect requests." Certain indirect requests are conventional and thus straightforward to interpret, such as "Can you turn on the heater?", but others require substantial additional inference, such as "It's cold in here." How do comprehenders make inferences about a…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…

A large amount of literature exists on how native speakers derive and process pragmatic inferences, yet few studies have examined the issue in second language learners, despite a controversial debate of second language (L2) ultimate attainment of phenomena situated at external interfaces. This study contributes to the debate on the integration of…

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…

The Interface Hypothesis proposes that second language (L2) learners, even at highly proficient levels, often fail to integrate information at the external interfaces where grammar interacts with other cognitive systems. While much early L2 work has focused on the syntax-discourse interface or scalar implicatures at the semantics-pragmatics…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Two studies examined the role of input distribution in English construction learning, by child learners from a Mandarin first-language background, and the extent to which phonological short-term memory and awareness predicted such learning. In the first study, 4th-grade students of Mandarin Chinese (N = 121) learned the English object-cleft…

Metaphor development in conjunction with verbal intelligence and linguistic competence in middle childhood and at the transition to early adolescence was investigated. 298 individuals between seven and ten years (chronological age) who attended grades two-four (mental age) were tested for metaphor processing by the Metaphoric Triads Task, for…

The ability to predict future events in the environment and learn from them is a fundamental component of adaptive behavior across species. Here we propose that inferring predictions facilitates speech processing and word learning in the early stages of language development. Twelve- and 24-month olds' electrophysiological brain responses to heard…

Subject-verb agreement constitutes a robust characteristic of French. However, especially at beginner and intermediate levels, second language (L2) learners might substitute or fail to recognize an infinitive for a conjugated verb, or a 3rd person singular form for a plural form, as "Les enfants mangera" (The children will eat--3rd…

Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities ("seven, most") and qualities ("red, spotty") present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding, not only of what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning…

Readers differentially adopt an agent's perspective as a function of pronouns encountered during reading. The present study assessed the reliability of this effect across narrative contexts and self-reported variation in levels of engagement during reading. Experiment 1 used an extended sample (N = 263) and replicated an interactive influence of…