Hidden structure refers to the units of organization that a child cannot directly observe when they are learning language (e.g. phonemes, morpheme boundaries, URs, phrases). In this dissertation, I propose a novel computational model that learns hidden structures in-tandem with the grammar. My model consists of two Maximum Entropy sub-models that…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Verb-marking errors such as "she play football" and "daddy singing" are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed…

Purpose: Disfluencies can be classified as stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) or typical disfluencies (TDs). Dividing TDs further, stalls (fillers and repetitions) are thought to be prospective, occurring due to planning glitches, and revisions (word and phrase revisions, word fragments) are thought to be retrospective, occurring when a speaker…

Individual speakers' speech patterns differ from one another, despite presumably similar language input. What are the sources of this individual variability? In this dissertation, I explore sources of individual differences in pronunciation of coronal obstruents (/s/, /t[superscript h]/, /c[superscript h]/, /c/) at the ends of nouns in Korean.…

Developing spoken grammar awareness is a crucial first step in fostering noticing habits (Schmidt, 1990) in second language learners. Classroom instruction using corpus-informed materials is an ideal way to assist this development, given that these materials are based on research which informs us about the most frequent forms and uses of spoken…

This article discusses the positioning of "wh" words in Modern Laos Sign Language. Research indicates that there are two common patterns for the position of "wh" words in spoken languages: the initial position and in situ (Dryer 2013). However, in some sign languages, it seems that "wh" word positioning is…

Background: One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can…

Through analysis of the language, this study aimed to investigate the current practice of using songs in public library storytimes. Language interactions in 68 storytime programs involving 652 child participants were observed and transcribed. Then, textual analysis was conducted to examine the language of singing songs, focusing on how language…

Purpose: The study examined the use of percent grammatical utterances (PGUs) for assessing grammatical skills in Mandarin-speaking 3-year-old children. Method: Participants were 30 Mandarin-speaking 3-year-olds with typical development. Language samples were collected in two visits for each child using a picture description task. Children were…

Research on the second language (L2) acquisition of the Spanish copulas has been central to our understanding of key concepts and issues in the field of SLA such as stages of development and variability in L2s. However, this research has focused nearly exclusively on native English-speaking learners. The present study examined native…

The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers "all," "every," and "each" in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic…

To date there have been a lot of currently emerging studies focusing on English speaking anxiety experienced by Indonesian university students. Nevertheless, particularly the studies have not investigated university students in Lampung region as the new context. This study aims to describe the level, attitude and perception, and the causes of…

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

Background: Little is known about the spontaneous speech characteristics of young children with language delay in Mandarin, relative to their peers. Until the recent development of standardized language assessments normed in China on Mandarin-speaking children, it was difficult to independently identify atypically developing children to study…