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Showing 1 to 15 of 39 results Save | Export
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Getz, Heidi R. – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2019
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…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Language Universals, Grammar, Language Usage
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Sarvasy, Hannah S. – Journal of Child Language, 2019
The 'root infinitive' phenomenon in child speech is known from major languages such as Dutch. In this case study, a child acquiring the Papuan language Nungon in a remote village setting in Papua New Guinea uses two different non-finite verb forms as predicates of main clauses ('root' contexts) between ages 2;3 and 3;3. The first root non-finite…
Descriptors: Case Studies, Verbs, Rural Areas, Child Language
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Monaghan, Padraic; Rowland, Caroline F. – Language Learning, 2017
Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language…
Descriptors: Computational Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Second Language Learning
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Fodor, Janet Dean – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
An evaluation measure (EM) guides a learner's choice of grammar when more than one is compatible with available input. EM must be universal, so children receiving comparable input acquire comparable grammars. It must favor the choices children actually make. The theoretical shift from rule-based grammars to principles-and-parameter-based grammars…
Descriptors: Language Processing, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Grammar
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Pearl, Lisa; Ho, Timothy; Detrano, Zephyr – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
It has long been recognized that there is a natural dependence between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition, with the idea that the right knowledge representation enables acquisition to happen as reliably as it does. Given this, a reasonable criterion for a theory of knowledge representation is that it be…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Grammar, Qualitative Research
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Yang, Charles – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
I review the classic literature in generative grammar and Marr's three-level program for cognitive science to defend the Evaluation Metric as a psychological theory of language learning. Focusing on well-established facts of language variation, change, and use, I argue that optimal statistical principles embodied in Bayesian inference models are…
Descriptors: Language Research, Generative Grammar, Language Acquisition, Cognitive Science
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Deng, Xiangjun; Mai, Ziyin; Yip, Virginia – First Language, 2018
This study examines the "ba" and "bei" constructions in Mandarin using data from the Tong corpus, a new multimedia longitudinal child language corpus. A unified aspectual account of the two constructions is proposed: both require telic predicates, and should thus correlate with the perfective rather than imperfective aspect for…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Verbs, Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics
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Omaki, Akira; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2015
Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Linguistic Input
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Pearl, Lisa – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
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…
Descriptors: Generative Grammar, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theory, Computational Linguistics
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Pozzan, Lucia; Valian, Virginia – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2017
We compare the predictions of two different accounts of first language acquisition by investigating the relative contributions of abstract syntax and input frequency to the elicited production of main and embedded questions by 36 monolingual English-speaking toddlers aged 3;00 to 5;11. In particular, we investigate whether children's accuracy…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Comparative Analysis
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Rissman, Lilia; Goldin-Meadow, Susan – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not…
Descriptors: Verbs, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input, Child Language
Snow, Catherine E. – Grantee Submission, 2014
In the early years of the "Journal of Child Language," there was considerable disagreement about the role of language input or adult-child interaction in children's language acquisition. The view that quantity and quality of input to language-learning children is relevant to their language development has now become widely accepted as a…
Descriptors: Linguistic Input, Child Language, Literacy, Early Childhood Education
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Uno, Mariko – Journal of Child Language, 2016
This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…
Descriptors: Japanese, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Child Language
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Kerkhoff, Annemarie O. – First Language, 2013
This article questions how two very similar sets of experiments can yield such very different findings, and comments on the differences between the studies. Here Annamarie Kerkhoff presents a commentary on some perceived differences between the studies in areas such as age groups and group sizes evaluated. Kerkhoff also comments on some…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Language Research, Color, Linguistic Input
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Daland, Robert – Journal of Child Language, 2013
What are the sources of variation in the input, and how much do they matter for language acquisition? This study examines frequency variation in manner-of-articulation classes in child and adult input. The null hypothesis is that segmental frequency distributions of language varieties are unigram (modelable by stationary, ergodic processes), and…
Descriptors: Child Language, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Input, English
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