Negative sentences with epistemic modals (e.g., John "might" not come/John "can" not come) contain two logical operators, negation and the modal, which yields a potential semantic ambiguity depending on scope assignment. The two possible readings are in a subset/superset relation, such that the strong reading ("can…

Much work on child sentence processing has demonstrated that children are able to use various linguistic cues to incrementally resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities, but they fail to use syntactic or interpretability cues that arrive later in the sentence. The present study explores whether children incrementally resolve filler-gap dependencies,…

Examination of infant vocalization patterns across interactive and noninteractive contexts may facilitate better understanding of early communication development. In the current study, with 24 infant-parent dyads, infant volubility increased significantly when parent interaction ceased (presenting a "still face," or SF) after a period of…

Learning new words involves decoding both how a word fits the current situation and how it could be used in new situations. Three studies explore how two types of cues--sentence structure and the availability of multiple instances--affect children's extensions of nouns and verbs. In each study, 2.5-year-olds heard nouns, verbs, or no new word…

Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…

Children's pragmatic competence in deriving conversational implicatures (and scalar implicatures in particular) offers an intriguing standpoint to explore how developmental, methodological, and purely theoretical perspectives interact and feed each other. In this paper, we focus mainly on developmental and methodological issues, showing that…

This study is a systematic analysis of the information content of a wide range of distributional cues to word boundaries, individually and in combination, in naturally occurring child-directed speech across three languages (English, Polish, and Turkish). The paper presents a series of statistical analyses examining the relative predictive strength…

In many languages, significant numbers of words are used in more than one grammatical category; English, in particular, has many words that can be used as both nouns and verbs. Such "ambicategoricality" potentially poses problems for children trying to learn the grammatical properties of words and has been used to argue against the logical…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…