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Laura Franchin; Anna Teresa Porrini; Luca Surian – Language Learning and Development, 2024
Young children's (n = 108) and adults' (n = 40) ability to compute ad-hoc quantity conversational implicatures was assessed using a new implicit task that relied on eye-tracking. The children were 2 and 5 years old. Looking times reveal that all participants interpreted simple references by relying on implicatures. However, 2-year-olds failed to…
Descriptors: Young Children, Age Differences, Adults, Interpersonal Communication
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Carbajal, M. Julia; Chartofylaka, Lamprini; Hamilton, Mollie; Fiévet, Anne-Caroline; Peperkamp, Sharon – Language Learning and Development, 2020
We investigate bilingual children's perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., "green" is pronounced with a final [m] in "green pen"), while French has voicing assimilation…
Descriptors: Auditory Perception, Word Recognition, Video Games, Toddlers
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Nordmeyer, Ann E.; Frank, Michael C. – Language Learning and Development, 2018
Adults find negative sentences difficult to process, but an informative context can facilitate processing substantially, suggesting that much of this difficulty may come from the pragmatics of negation. Are children sensitive to the pragmatics of negation as well? Although children perform poorly on many tests of negation comprehension, we argue…
Descriptors: Pragmatics, Language Acquisition, Sentence Structure, Toddlers
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Rissman, Lilia; Goldin-Meadow, Susan – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input, Child Language
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Brandt, Silke; Nitschke, Sanjo; Kidd, Evan – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…
Descriptors: Priming, German, Phrase Structure, Linguistic Input
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Taumoepeau, Mele – Language Learning and Development, 2016
Using multi-level growth modeling, we examined the effect of several measures of maternal input on growth in children's word types from 15-54 months. Mothers and children engaged in a picture description task (N = 77) at 15, 24, 33, and 54 months; the frequency of children's observed word types at each wave was coded and additional independent…
Descriptors: Child Language, Vocabulary Development, Mothers, Parent Influence
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Pozzan, Lucia; Gleitman, Lila R.; Trueswell, John C. – Language Learning and Development, 2016
When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…
Descriptors: Semantics, Syntax, Ambiguity (Semantics), Linguistic Theory
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Leischner, Franziska N.; Weissenborn, Jürgen; Naigles, Letitia R. – Language Learning and Development, 2016
The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…
Descriptors: German, Language Acquisition, Grammar, Nouns