This study examined early Hebrew verb acquisition, highlighting CDS-CS relations across inflectional and derivational verb learning. It was carried out on a corpus of longitudinal dense dyadic interactions of two Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1;8-2;2 and their parents. Findings revealed correlated patterns within and between CDS and CS corpora in…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

This work investigates the acquisition of Spanish dative alternation (DA) in the production of English-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children. We explore whether "a/para"-datives and dative clitic doubled (DCLD) structures are syntactically derived from one another or, whether they are different structures. We also examine…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

Purpose: Our purpose was to test the competing sources of input (CSI) hypothesis by evaluating an intervention based on its principles. This hypothesis proposes that children's use of main verbs without tense is the result of their treating certain sentence types in the input (e.g., "Was 'she laughing'?") as models for declaratives…

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…

Languages vary considerably in how they represent motion. One major source of variation (Talmy, 2000) depends on whether linguistic systems lexicalize path in the verb (verb-framed languages) or in satellites (satellite-framed languages). This typological difference involves more than different verb types in that it also affects elements outside…

Languages differ in how they package the components of an event into words to form sentences. For example, while some languages typically encode the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., running), others more often use verbs that encode the path (e.g., ascending). Prior research has demonstrated that children and adults have lexicalization biases;…

In this dissertation, the robustness of the relationship between the lexical frequency of phonotactic patterns and word-acceptability is examined for words of Amharic, an understudied Semitic language. The patterns under investigation span the whole verb root and include both under-represented and over-represented consonant distributions in the…

Learning to talk about motion in a second language is very difficult because it involves restructuring deeply entrenched patterns from the first language. In this paper we argue that statistical learning can explain why L2 learners are only partially successful in restructuring their second language grammars. We explore to what extent L2 learners…

Recently researchers have suggested that syntactic priming may facilitate the production of "wh"-questions with obligatory auxiliary verbs, particularly when learners are prompted to produce those questions with a wide variety of lexical items (McDonough & Kim, 2009; McDonough & Mackey, 2008). However, learners' ability to benefit from syntactic…

The present study investigates flexibility of verb use in the early stages of English multiword development, and its relationship with patterns attested in the input. The data is taken from a case study of a monolingual English-speaking boy aged 2; 5-2; 9 and his mother while engaged in daily activities in the home. Data were coded according to…

The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some…