This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

The present paper addresses the study of non-arbitrariness in language within a deep learning framework. We present a set of experiments aimed at assessing the pervasiveness of different forms of non-arbitrary phonological patterns across a set of typologically distant languages. Different sequence-processing neural networks are trained in a set…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

Lexical semantics is the field of cognitive science which attempts to explain how speakers learn to use and accept sentences like "She filled the glass with water" but avoid and reject sentences like "She poured the glass with water," often with poor or impoverished evidence. In order to explain why some verbs alternate in…

This article explores the kinds of cues young children use as a basis for extending early works in an effort to label novel referent objects. Proposals that intend to explain how first words are extended and used to refer to objects or events for which no words explicitly exist are discussed. (DF)

Characteristics of language production shared by interlanguage and agrammatism, a linguistic symptom of aphasia, are discussed, and it is proposed that the two constitute a reduced system within the language, derived from the language's conceptual system. (MSE)

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…

The effects of a prose passage's physical structure and semantic organization upon free recall performance was investigated. Passages, describing characteristics of fictitious countries, contained either five or nine paragraphs of varying lengths. Differences in the distribution of materials interacted with type of semantic organization to produce…

Discusses the learning process and language usage in the English classroom, building on a theory of language originated by Alfred Korzybski. (RB)

The purpose of this study was to gather information on the acquisition of non-Indo-European languages. The field work was conducted in the village of Faleasao on the island of Ta'u in the Manu'a group of American Samoa from June, 1968 to June, 1969. The data collected consists primarily of tape recordings of naturally occurring and elicited speech…

Describes the use of language analysis and speech-act categories (declarations, assertives, directives, commissives, and expressives) to deal with meaningful classroom concerns, thereby enabling the teacher and students to work more effectively together. (KEH)

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

Research has demonstrated that second language learners benefit considerably from form-focused instruction within the context of a communicative language program. Thus, it is suggested that second language teachers should provide guided, form-based instruction in a meaningful context. Instructional strategies based on three dimensions of…

Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a…