Both classic thought experiments and recent empirical evidence suggest that children frequently encounter new words whose meanings are underdetermined by the extralinguistic contexts in which they occur. The role that these referentially ambiguous events play in children's word learning is central to ongoing debates in the field. Do children learn…

Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…

I argue that the variation within and across contexts detailed by Shin & Miller is indicative of a broader phenomenon in which morphosyntax and the discourse context are intertwined, including elements like perspective, discourse relations, information structure, and common ground. Appealing to independent evidence highlighting the role of…

Children achieve better long-term language outcomes than adults. However, it remains unclear whether children actually learn language "more quickly" than adults during real-time exposure to input--indicative of true superior language learning abilities--or whether this advantage stems from other factors. To examine this issue, we…

This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children…

Children learn words in a social environment, facilitated in part by social cues from caregivers, such as eye-gaze and gesture. A common assumption is that social cues convey either perceptual or social information, depending on the age of the child. In this review of research on word learning and social cues during early childhood, we propose…

Codeswitching is a common feature of bilingual language practices, yet its impact on word learning is poorly understood. Critically, processing costs associated with codeswitching may extend to learning. Moreover, verbs tend to be more difficult to learn than nouns, and the challenges of learning verbs could compound with processing costs…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

This study aims to identify similarities in morphological, phonological, lexical, and syntactical aspects between Arabic and English child language. It seeks to understand how children develop grammar at different stages, adhering to the rules acquired at each stage. This research analyzes YouTube videos featuring Arabic and English-speaking…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

Purpose: Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. This study asks whether such text…