In this article, I advocate for an enriched view of children's linguistic input, with the aim of building sustainable and tangible links between theoretical models of language development and families' everyday experiences. Children's language experiences constrain theoretical models in ways that may illuminate universal learning biases. However,…

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…

We trained a computational model (the Chunk-Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child-caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism--backward transitional probability--is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We…

This article examines phonological development and its relationship to input statistics. Using novel data from a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous child speech in Polish, we evaluate and compare the predictions of a variety of input-based phonotactic models for syllable structure acquisition. We find that many commonly examined input statistics…

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…

We present data from an artificial language domain that suggest new contributions to the theory of syntactic triggers. Whether a learning algorithm is capable of matching the achievements of child learners depends in part on how much parametric ambiguity there is in the input. For practical reasons this cannot be established for the domain of all…

In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…

Presents an alternative definition of negative evidence, based on the idea that the unique discourse structure created in the juxtaposition of child error and adult correct form can reveal the child in contrast or conflict between the two forms. Findings reveal that children reproduced the correct irregular model more often and persisted with…

Research presented in this paper on the character of infant-directed speech and the nature of infant speech perception abilities from 6 to 12 months suggests that prosody contributes significantly to early analyses of child languages and assists infants in developing root processes of parsing. (104 references) (Author/CK)