This study examined the effect of a shape cue (i.e., co-speech gesture) on word depth. We taught 23 preschoolers (M = 3;5 years, SD = 5.82) novel objects with either shape (SHP) or indicator (IND) gestures. SHP gestures mimicked object form, but IND gestures were not semantically related to the object (e.g., an upward-facing palm, extended toward…

What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of "or." We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on "or" uses.…

Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some -- like "red," "round," "rough," or "rectangular" -- map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others -- like "ready," "reasonable," or "required" -- express abstract…

Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word's meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping. But while formal…

We investigate German-Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system,…

In Korean language, questions containing ambiguous wh-words may be interpreted as either wh-questions or yes-no questions. This study investigated 43 Korean three-year-olds' ability to disambiguate eight indeterminate questions using prosodic and visual cues. The intonation of each question provided a cue as to whether it should be interpreted as…

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds' real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to "SVO" or "OVS" sentences containing active…

The present study applies a multidimensional methodological approach to the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax. It focuses on evaluating the degree of productivity of an infrequent subject-verb agreement pattern in the early acquisition of French and considers the explanatory role played by factors such as input frequency, semantic…

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and "wh"-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

A new test of children's flexible use of semantic cues for word learning extended previous results. In Experiment 1, three- to five-year-olds (N = 51) completed two tests of interpreting several novel words for the same stimulus arrays. Within-sentence phrasal cues implied different stimulus referent properties. Children's cue-using…

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment…

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

Young children typically do not use order-of-mention to resolve ambiguous pronouns, but may do so if given additional cues, such as gestures. Additionally, this ability to utilize gestures may be enhanced in bilingual children, who may be more sensitive to such cues due to their unique language experience. We asked monolingual and bilingual…