This study investigated the effect of semantic information on artificial grammar learning (AGL). Recursive grammars of different complexity levels (regular language, mirror language, copy language) were investigated in a series of AGL experiments. In the with-semantics condition, participants acquired semantic information prior to the AGL…

The present study explores the initial stages of incidental acquisition of two grammatical properties of verbs (subcategorization and [ir]regularity) during reading in first language (L1) and second language (L2) German using an adjusted self-paced reading paradigm. The results indicate that L1 speakers are superior to L2 speakers in the…

Previous research suggests that English-speaking children comprehend agent-patient verb passives earlier than experiencer-theme verb passives (Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985). We report three experiments examining whether such effects reflect delayed acquisition of the passive syntax or instead are an artifact of the experimental task,…

Distributional information is a potential cue for learning syntactic categories. Recent studies demonstrate a developmental trajectory in the level of abstraction of distributional learning in young infants. Here we investigate the effect of prosody on infants' learning of adjacent relations between words. Twelve- to thirteen-month-old infants…

A central issue in second language acquisition (SLA) research is the relationship between morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic knowledge among L2 learners. It has been proposed that, L2 language acquisition starts with transfer of L1 semantic and morphosyntactic processing strategies; however, it has been observed that, at lower proficiency…

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an…

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…

Much recent research has described the development of innovative functions of "like" as a discourse marker ("'Like' they're trying to be discreet about it") or discourse particle ("Maybe it's 'like' a girl thing") and as a quotative marker ("He's 'like' 'I don't want to work until later'"). Comparatively little is known about how speakers acquire…

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as "Is the boy who smoking is crazy?" because they have innate knowledge of "structure dependence" and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid…

The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children can use syntax to infer the meanings of words. This paper presents experimental evidence that children are also able to use word inflections to infer word reference. Twenty-four- and 30-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Children were shown a pair of novel…

We investigated the relationship between the acquisition of singular-plural morpho-syntax and children's representation of the distinction between singular and plural sets. Experiment 1 tested 18-month-olds using the manual-search paradigm and found that, like 14-month-olds (Feigenson & Carey, 2005), they distinguished three objects from one but…

Research done while the first author was on a Science Scholarship from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC); research also supported by an NRC grant to the second author; forms part of Shannon Moeser's doctoral thesis submitted to McGill University. (VM)

Examined parental speech data demonstrating that linguistic input to children does not contain sufficient information to support unaided learning of the pronoun "one." Examined 18-month-olds' interpretation of sentences with a "one" substitution. Found that 18-month-olds have command of the syntax of "one." Because…

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. (VM)

Preliminary version of this article presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 1971. Research and preparation of the paper supported in part by an Intramural Grant from the Regents of the University of California to T. Kenney. (VM)