In standard models of language production or comprehension, the elements which are retrieved from memory and combined into a syntactic structure are "lemmas" or "lexical items". Such models implicitly take a "lexicalist" approach, which assumes that lexical items store meaning, syntax, and form together, that…

A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in…

Language is the basis of human communication and is the most important key to complete mental development and thinking. Therefore, children must learn to communicate using appropriate language. For this to happen, the development of language in the child must be understood as a biological process, complete with internal laws and with marked stages…

The incorporation of empirical and theoretical knowledge from the language acquisition literature into formal diachronic syntax has been largely exiguous despite the growth of the latter as a subfield in formal linguistics over the past thirty years. In this dissertation, it is shown that a greater knowledge of diachronic phenomena, particularly…

The linguistic interdependence hypothesis posits the existence of language features common to different languages. This set of characteristics, known as Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP), is a powerful facilitating agent in second language acquisition. Fluid intelligence (Gf), on the other hand, is the construct that encompasses those cognitive…

This dissertation investigates the wide-ranging implications of a simple fact: language unfolds over time. Whether as cognitive symbols in our minds, or as their physical realization in the world, if linguistic computations are not made over transient and shifting information as it occurs, they cannot be made at all. This dissertation explores the…

The article, "morphosyntactic peculiarities of the speech of children with Down's syndrome", treats, important aspects of the study of two adjacent branches of linguistics, namely, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics-Language development of the child accompanied by speech disorders, on the other hand, those morphosyntactic features…

This paper aims to discuss old and contemporary perspectives in understanding language acquisition taking into account the neural theory of language. Discussing a recent theory by Kuhl (2010), neural substrates of first language learning will be put forward (Berwick et al., 2013). Neural substrates of phonetic learning, word learning, sentence…

Background: Although there is a growing body of literature on cognitive and language processing in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), there is a major gap in the evidence for language intervention. Critically, speech-language therapists are often required to make clinical decisions for language intervention on specific…

One primary problem in extremely preterm children is the occurrence of atypical language development. The aim of this study was to explore the components of language (articulatory phonetics, lexicon and syntax) in comprehension and production in extremely preterm children between the 4th and 5th year of age. The language section of the Preschool…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…

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,…