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Pagliarini, Elena; Reyes, Marta Andrada; Guasti, Maria Teresa; Crain, Stephen; Gavarró, Anna – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2021
In English, the sentence "Mary didn't eat pizza or sushi" is assigned the "neither interpretation" (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Child Language, Language Acquisition, Contrastive Linguistics
Green, Jennifer; Hodge, Gabrielle; Kelly, Barbara F. – Language Documentation & Conservation, 2022
In this article, we provide an overview of the last twenty years of research on Indigenous sign languages, deaf community sign languages, co-speech gesture, and multimodal communication in the Australian context. From a global perspective, research on sign languages and on the gestures that normally accompany speech has been used as the basis for…
Descriptors: Deafness, Indigenous Populations, Sign Language, Nonverbal Communication
Adam Liter – ProQuest LLC, 2022
This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…
Descriptors: Case Studies, Grammar, Linguistic Competence, Measurement Techniques
Danyang Wang – ProQuest LLC, 2022
This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…
Descriptors: Mandarin Chinese, Phrase Structure, Language Research, Child Language
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
Kim, Yongho; Song, Seon-mi; Kellogg, David – Language and Education, 2021
Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…
Descriptors: Learning Theories, Sociocultural Patterns, Psychological Patterns, Maturity (Individuals)
Knabe, Melina L.; Vlach, Haley A. – First Language, 2020
Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…
Descriptors: Child Language, Children, Language Acquisition, Models
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
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
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
Thornton, Rosalind; Rombough, Kelly – Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 2015
To test between two recent accounts of the early stages in the acquisition of negation, we conducted an elicited production study with 25 children, between 2;05 and 3;04 (mean 2;11). The experimental study produced a robust set of negative sentences, with considerable individual variation. Although 13 of the child participants mainly produced…
Descriptors: Syntax, Language Acquisition, Language Research, Toddlers
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
Lukyanenko, Cynthia; Conroy, Anastasia; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Learning and Development, 2014
In this study we investigate young children's knowledge of syntactic constraints on Noun Phrase reference by testing 30-month-olds' interpretation of two types of transitive sentences. In a preferential looking task, we find that children prefer different interpretations for transitive sentences whose object NP is a name (e.g., "She's patting…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Form Classes (Languages), Preferences, Syntax
Moscati, Vincenzo; Crain, Stephen – Language Learning and Development, 2014
Negative sentences with epistemic modals (e.g., John "might" not come/John "can" not come) contain two logical operators, negation and the modal, which yields a potential semantic ambiguity depending on scope assignment. The two possible readings are in a subset/superset relation, such that the strong reading ("can…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Epistemology, Semantics, Linguistic Theory
Su, Yi; Zhou, Peng; Crain, Stephen – Journal of Child Language, 2012
There are three hallmarks of core linguistic properties. First, they are expected to be manifested in typologically different languages. Second, they should unify superficially unrelated linguistic phenomena. Third, they are expected to emerge early in the course of language development, all things being equal (Crain, 1991). The present study…
Descriptors: Linguistic Theory, Semantics, Language Acquisition, Mandarin Chinese