The cross-categorical use of nouns and verbs poses a challenging problem to young language learners because they are known to be less willing to accept that a single form of a word be used for more than one linguistic purpose (e.g., one-form/one-function principle). The present study investigated whether children under 3 years of age are able to…

Children acquire language in conversation. This is where they are exposed to the community language by more expert speakers. This exposure is effectively governed by adult reliance on pragmatic principles in conversation: Cooperation, Conventionality, and Contrast. All three play a central role in speakers' use of language for communication in…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…