I argue that the variation within and across contexts detailed by Shin & Miller is indicative of a broader phenomenon in which morphosyntax and the discourse context are intertwined, including elements like perspective, discourse relations, information structure, and common ground. Appealing to independent evidence highlighting the role of…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…

The induction problems facing language learners have played a central role in debates about the types of learning biases that exist in the human brain. Many linguists have argued that some of the learning biases necessary to solve these language induction problems must be both innate and language-specific (i.e., the Universal Grammar (UG)…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what "or" means in ordinary statements of the form "A or B". Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". An alternative is to suppose that…

This paper discusses empirical findings from the first language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese suggesting that certain properties of the logical form of natural language are not learned from experience. These unlearnable properties appear to manifest themselves in the child's linguistic knowledge as soon as prerequisite conditions are met.…

The question of why language acquisition is not instantaneous is addressed in terms of two related issues: the logical and the developmental aspects of language acquisition. The role of linguistic theory and research in determining the interplay of these two aspects of grammatical development is examined. It is suggested that the…

Maintains that our understanding of language is enhanced by the study of pathology, rather than just the study of the normal. It is a sound complementary base to learn more about how language encodes more than labels. It encodes histories, personal myths, and affects and reflects aspects of deviance and delay in function. (SL)

Argues that current attempts to show that forward directionality effects can also be induced in Japanese acquisition do not succeed in supporting the forward directionality preference of anaphora. (57 references) (Author/CB)

This examination focuses on the idea that child language acquisition is constrained by the same principles that have been found to hold on syllable structure across languages. First, a recently-proposed constraint on syllable structure, the Sonority Cycle, is outlined, and the way that it accounts for syllabic structure across languages is…

This paper reports on the acquisition of the voicing contrast in Mexican-Spanish word-initial stops. In Study 1, three Spanish-speaking monolingual children were recorded every two weeks for seven months, beginning when the children were about 1;7. In Study 2, four monolingual children about 3;10 were recorded once or twice. Two analyses were…

Attempts to characterize the process of first language acquisition by children. Suggests that language learning involves the acquisition of both language knowledge and language behavior, hence of the internalized representations underlying linguistic competence and also the ability to deploy this knowledge in interpreting and speaking the language…