Associative anaphora refers to a discourse operation that links a definite determiner phrase (DP) to an antecedent that acts as an indirect referent of the definite DP. For example, in the sequence 'I bought a laptop. The keyboard was black', the definite DP 'the keyboard' is linked to 'a laptop', meaning 'the keyboard of the laptop'. The…

Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word's meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping. But while formal…

What is vision's role in driving early word production? To answer this, we assessed parent-report vocabulary questionnaires administered to congenitally blind children (N = 40, Mean age = 24 months [R: 7-57 months]) and compared the size and contents of their productive vocabulary to those of a large normative sample of sighted children (N =…

The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers "all," "every," and "each" in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

Children tend to produce words earlier when they are connected to a variety of other words along the phonological and semantic dimensions. Though these semantic and phonological connectivity effects have been extensively documented, little is known about their underlying developmental mechanism. One possibility is that learning is driven by…

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with…

The aim was to investigate the staff's language support towards children in Swedish preschools after eight weeks of structured language support. This study took place after an initial study of six weeks' language support. To identify support of Language Learning Environment, Opportunities and Interactions an observation-tool was used. Structured…

During acquisition, children must learn both the meanings of words and how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier "some" and its pragmatically enriched meaning: 'some but not all'. Some studies have shown that 'scalar implicature' -- that "some" implies…

Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their…

The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child-directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co-occurrence. Previous work using these models has not…

Scalar implicatures (SIs) lie at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and therefore have evoked great interest for language acquisition research. Many acquisition studies show that young children know the literal semantics of scalar items (like "some", "might", "start" and "or") but have…

Using computational simulations, this work demonstrates that it is possible to learn a systematic relation between words' sound and their meanings. The sound-meaning relation was learned from a corpus of phonologically transcribed child-directed speech by using the linear discriminative learning (LDL) framework (Baayen, Chuang, Shafaei-Bajestan,…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…