Word segmentation, detecting word boundaries in continuous speech, is a fundamental aspect of language learning that can occur solely by the computation of statistical and speech cues. Fifty-four children underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to three streams of concatenated syllables that contained either high…

In this paper we present an unsupervised neural network model of bilingual lexical development and interaction. We focus on how the representational structures of the bilingual lexicons can emerge, develop, and interact with each other as a function of the learning history. The results show that: (1) distinct representations for the two lexicons…

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children…

This study employed an artificial language learning paradigm together with a combined behavioral/event-related potential (ERP) approach to examine the neurocognition of the processing of gender agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology that is problematic in adult second language (L2) learning. Subjects learned to speak and comprehend an…

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the…

Parents of 592 children between the age of 0 ; 8 and 1 ; 4 completed the Estonian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (ECDI Infant Form). The relationships between comprehension and production of different categories of words and gestures were examined. According to the results of regression modelling the…

The aim of the article is to provide preliminary data on the use of auxiliaries and clitics in Serbian-speaking children with developmental language impairment. Two groups of children (a group of 30 children with developmental language impairment and a group of 30 typically developing children) aged between 48 and 83 months and matched on IQ took…

Many theories of language production and perception assume that in the normal course of processing a word, additional non-target words (lexical neighbors) become active. The properties of these neighbors can provide insight into the structure of representations and processing mechanisms in the language processing system. To infer the properties of…

New studies on how language learning occurs are beginning to chip away at some long-held notions about second-language acquisition and point to potential learning benefits for students who speak more than one language. New National Science Foundation-funded collaborations among educators, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and…

Superlative quantifiers ("at least 3", "at most 3") and comparative quantifiers ("more than 2", "fewer than 4") are traditionally taken to be interdefinable: the received view is that "at least n" and "at most n" are equivalent to "more than n-1" and "fewer than n+1",…

This dissertation compares the knowledge of Russian Verbal Aspect in two types of learners enrolled in college level Russian courses: foreign language learners of Russian whose native language is English and heritage language speakers of Russian whose dominant language at the time of study is English. Russian Aspect is known to be problematic both…

How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC[subscript i]VC[subscript i]). We examined three types of monosyllabic CCVC words:…

An empirical study is presented that tests a novel prediction generated by the Metaphor-by-Pattern-Completion (MPC) connectionist model of metaphor comprehension (Thomas & Mareschal, 2001). The MPC model predicts a developmental progression in the way that children process metaphors, from a preference for basic-level metaphors to a preference for…

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this "arbitrariness" assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking…

Previous research using the name-based categorization task has shown that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn 2 words that only differ by 1 consonantal feature but fail to do so when the words only differ by 1 vocalic feature. This asymmetry was taken as evidence for the proposal that consonants are more important than vowels at the…