There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

Construction Grammar has been a prominent framework in linguistic research for nearly three decades, attracting scholars from various disciplines, including language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. While considerable progress has been made in understanding the first language (L1) construction learning of various languages,…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

The present study examines the development of the earliest type of complex predicates to emerge in child Hebrew -- extended predicate constructions. These constructions take the form of a modal/aspectual operator followed by an infinitival verb form (e.g., "roce lesaxek" 'want to.play'), and since they serve various discursive functions…

We investigated whether children's inhibitory control (IC) is associated with their ability to produce irregular past tense verb forms as well as learn from corrective feedback following overregularization errors. Forty-eight 3;6 to 4;5 year old children were tested on the irregular past tense and provided with adult corrective input via models of…

This mixed methods study draws upon theoretical perspectives from usage-based linguistics (UBL) and variationist sociolinguistics to explore four learners' use of second language (L2) Spanish present tense indicative verbal inflectional morphology (i.e., simple present conjugations). The study compares the frequency and distribution of students'…

Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task,…

This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the second language (L2) acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (a) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while (b) they…

This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of…

An elicited production study investigated subject--aux inversion in 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 control groups, typically-developing 5-year-old children and 3-year-old children matched by mean length of utterance. The experimental findings showed that children with specific language impairment produced…

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection.…

This study examined early Hebrew verb acquisition, highlighting CDS-CS relations across inflectional and derivational verb learning. It was carried out on a corpus of longitudinal dense dyadic interactions of two Hebrew-speaking toddlers aged 1;8-2;2 and their parents. Findings revealed correlated patterns within and between CDS and CS corpora in…

This study combines explicit (pen-and-paper) and sensitive (time-pressured) measures to gauge the impact of three instructional interventions (contextualized input with meaning-focused activities, contextualized input with word-focused activities, and decontextualized input with word-focused exercises) on the learning of 20 L2 French target verbs.…