Multilingual research could offer a unique perspective on how the languages already acquired by a person affect the online processing of a new language. But it is currently difficult to assess this issue because theoretical accounts of multilingualism have focused on acquisition rather than processing and most empirical research to date has…

Lexical knowledge is complex, multidimensional, and difficult to pin down to a set of defined components. The development, organization, and use of lexical knowledge in the first and additional languages are studied in a number of neighbouring disciplines beyond second language acquisition and applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics,…

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of…

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…

In this study we investigate young children's knowledge of syntactic constraints on Noun Phrase reference by testing 30-month-olds' interpretation of two types of transitive sentences. In a preferential looking task, we find that children prefer different interpretations for transitive sentences whose object NP is a name (e.g., "She's patting…

Highly abstract predicates (e.g. "think") present a number of difficulties for language learners (Gleitman et al., 2005). A partial solution to learning these verbs is that learners exploit regularities in the syntactic frames in which these verbs occur. While agreeing with this general approach to learning verbs, we caution that this…

What makes a child's language development trajectory have the patterns that it has, and what causes differences across children in those patterns? These fundamental questions have for over half a century been at the heart of research on language development in monolingual children, on the cross-linguistic development of language in children from…

Researchers have suggested that there is a noun bias in children's early vocabularies brought about by features of adults' child-directed utterances, which may vary across languages (E. V. Bates et al., 1994; D. Gentner, 1982). In the present study, the authors explored noun bias in 60 Filipino-English bilingual children whose 2 languages differed…

Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

This article describes the role of lexical acquisition in stuttering by examining the research on word learning and interactions between semantics and syntax in typically developing children and children who stutter. The potential effects of linguistic mismatches, or dysynchronies in language skills, on the possible onset and development of…

In this study of the placement of sentence negation in third language acquisition (L3), we argue that there is a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true second language (L2) and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Although there is considerable evidence for L2 influence on vocabulary acquisition in L3, not all researchers believe…

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a rewriting instrument in French that would be a valid indicator of the level of syntactic development of American students in French. Vocabulary is limited to those words found in the first level of "Ecouter et Parler;" only the present tense was used in the tests. The theory on which the tests…

Describes a study that examines the effect of an adult-child discourse structure on the word combination produced by 17 children at the single-word utterance level. There was a significant difference between pretest and posttest multiword production for the experimental group of six children, but no difference for the control group. (SED)