Learning the meaning of a verb is challenging because learners need to resolve two types of ambiguity: (1) word-referent mapping--finding the correct referent event of a verb, and (2) word-meaning mapping--inferring the correct meaning of the verb from the referent event (e.g., whether the meaning of an action word is TURNING or TWISTING). The…

The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense…

Children need to learn the demands of their native language in the early vocabulary development phase. In this dynamic process, parental multimodal input may shape neurodevelopmental trajectories while also being tailored by child-related factors. Moving beyond typically characterized group profiles, in this article, we synthesize growing evidence…

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such…

This study investigated the feasibility of a vocabulary-based teacher intervention to increase preschool teachers' production of complement clauses (e.g. "I wonder if we can put the monkey in the tree") in teacher-children play interactions. Using a multiple baseline across participants design we measured the impact of an intervention…

Phrasal verbs present persistent challenges for second language (L2) learners due to their figurative meanings, multiple interpretations, and variable word order. This article reviews five strands of research that contribute to effective phrasal verb instruction: corpus-based studies, which identify what to teach, and four instructional…

We investigate concrete acquisition theories for a derived approach to linking theory development and explore to what extent two prominent linking theories in the syntactic literature--UTAH and rUTAH--can be derived from the data that English-learning children encounter. We leverage a conceptual acquisition framework that specifies key aspects of…

Background: Parental input plays a central role in typical language acquisition and development. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), characterized by social communicative and language difficulties, parental input presents an important avenue for investigation as a target for intervention. A rich body of literature has identified which aspects of…

Children acquiring Japanese differ from those acquiring English with regard to the rate at which verbs are learned (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993). One possible explanation is that Japanese caregivers use verbs in referentially transparent contexts, which facilitate the form-meaning link. We examined this hypothesis by assessing differences in verb…

Debate around inflectional morphology in language acquisition has contrasted various rule- versus analogy-based approaches. This paper tests the rule-based Tolerance Principle (TP) against a new type of pattern in the acquisition of the possessive suffix -im in Northern East Cree. When possessed, each noun type either requires or disallows the…

Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic…

Construction Grammar has been a prominent framework in linguistic research for nearly three decades, attracting scholars from various disciplines, including language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. While considerable progress has been made in understanding the first language (L1) construction learning of various languages,…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

Usage-based theory has proposed that learning of linguistic constructions is facilitated by input that contains few high-frequency exemplars, in what is known as a skewed (or Zipfian) input distribution. Early empirical work provided support to this idea, but subsequent L2 research has provided mixed findings. However, previous approaches have not…