Given its complexity, abstractness, and central role in many logics, negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. Therefore, young children's gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a conceptual change that is necessary to represent logical meanings. However, it's also possible that expressing negation takes time…

Hidden structure refers to the units of organization that a child cannot directly observe when they are learning language (e.g. phonemes, morpheme boundaries, URs, phrases). In this dissertation, I propose a novel computational model that learns hidden structures in-tandem with the grammar. My model consists of two Maximum Entropy sub-models that…

Previous empirical research has shown that Portuguese children aged 4;0 to 6;0 are sensitive to the quality of stem-final vowels when acquiring the irregular plural forms of /l/-final words (acquisition order: plurals of /al, [epsilon]l, [Greek small reversed lunate sigma symbol]l, ul/ > plurals of /il/). This study presents a formal account of…

As an integral part of dynamic assessment, computerized dynamic assessment (CDA) offers learners computer-assisted automated mediation. Accordingly, the possible efficacy of corrective feedback seems to be enhanced with new technologies, such as artificial intelligence tools, that offer automatic corrective feedback. Using technology-enhanced…

Children's early grammatical constructions, e.g., SVO, exhibit a learning curve with cumulative verb types (CVT) increasing exponentially. According to Ninio (2006), the fact that learning curves, though nonlinear, can be modelled by a continuous regression suggests instant generalisation. Moreover, differences in initial verbs across children…

Children make use of various information in linguistic input to learn verbs, including syntactic distribution and semantic features. Within the intransitive verb class, unaccusative and unergative verbs differ in distribution with respect to word order as well as in semantic features such as telicity. Both the distributional and semantic…

Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from…

Languages employ different means to manifest the unaccusative-unergative distinction. In Mandarin Chinese, unaccusative verbs are allowed in the inversion construction "V-le NP", while unergative verbs are not. This grammaticality contrast brings a presence/absence contrast between the two verb classes in the inversion construction in…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Most children across the world learn to read and write in non-alphabetic orthographies such as abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas (e.g., Ethiopic Ge'ez), and morphosyllabaries (e.g., Chinese). However, most theories of reading, reading development, and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base of research in English--an outlier…

Benefits of self-testing for learning have been consistently shown for simple materials such as word lists learned by rote memorization. Considerably less evidence for such benefits exists for complex, more educationally relevant materials and its application to new situations. The present study explores the mechanisms underlying this transfer. To…

Norwegian embedded clauses give children two options for subject placement: preceding or following negation (S-Neg/Neg-S). In the adult language, S-Neg is the 'default' and highly frequent option, and Neg-S is infrequent in children's input. However, Neg-S may be argued to be the structurally less complex. We investigate whether children are aware…

This article reviews conversation analytic research on explanations in pedagogical interaction, particularly in language learning classrooms. In reviewing this literature, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive account of what is interactionally involved when giving pedagogical explanations so that future research investigating the…

Purpose: The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard…

Purpose: In the past three decades, statistical learning, that is, the capacity to detect patterns and regularities in the environment, has been shown to have an important role in language development. In particular, the ability to detect nonadjacent dependencies (NADs) between linguistic elements that are separated by intervening material seems…