The condition of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) has aroused immense interest among researchers and practitioners owing to its unique characteristics and clinical manifestations. Children with SLI have offered rich data for understanding of language processing with reference to cognitive functions as well as structural aspects of a given…

Structural regularities in language have often been attributed to symbolic or statistical general purpose computations, whereas perceptual factors influencing such generalizations have received less interest. Here, we use phonotactic-like constraints as a case study to ask whether the structural properties of specific perceptual and memory…

This paper examines the role of orthographic information used during training on the ability to learn a non-native vowel contrast. We investigate whether exposure to novel grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences can help learners in the acquisition of a new phonological contrast. Three related experiments were carried out on the acquisition of the…

Purpose: Letter knowledge is a key aspect of children's language development, yet relatively little research has aimed to understand the nature of lowercase letter knowledge. We considered 4 hypotheses about children's lowercase letter knowledge simultaneously--uppercase familiarity, uppercase-lowercase similarity, own-name advantage, and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to determine how between-language interaction contributes to phonological acquisition in bilingual Spanish-English speaking children. Method: A total of 24 typically developing children, ages 3;0 (years;months) to 4;0, were included in this study: 8 bilingual Spanish-English speaking children, 8…

Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, "i.e.", how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

Though preschoolers in certain experimental contexts strongly prefer to interpret ambiguous sentences containing quantified NPs and negation on the basis of surface syntax (e.g., Musolino's 1998 "observation of isomorphism"), contextual manipulations can lead to more adult-like behavior. But is isomorphism a "purely" pragmatic phenomenon, as…

The present study examined the relationship between hand preference degree and direction, functional language lateralization in Broca's and Wernicke's areas, and structural measures of the arcuate fasciculus. Results revealed an effect of degree of hand preference on arcuate fasciculus structure, such that consistently-handed individuals,…

In two experiments autobiographical memories from childhood were recalled to cue words naming common objects, locations, activities and emotions. Participants recalled their earliest specific memory associated with each word and dated their age at the time of the remembered event. A striking and specific finding emerged: age of earliest memory was…

Michael Apple's prescient review of Anyon et al.'s "Theory and Educational Research" reminds the educational community of the importance of purpose. In his own work, he has been consistent in--actually, insistent on--emphasizing the struggle over political projects. This is not an issue concerning only the Left as the scapegoat for the disparaging…

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English- and German-, but not French-learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish-learning infants' lexical stress preferential…

There is considerable debate regarding the simplification of adults' language when talking to young children with expressive language delays (ELD). While simplified input, also called telegraphic speech, is used by many parents and clinicians working with young children, its use has been discouraged in much of the clinical literature. In addition…

How do infants find the words in the speech stream? Computational models help us understand this feat by revealing the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies that infants might use. Here, we outline a computational model of word segmentation that aims both to incorporate cues proposed by language acquisition researchers and to…

We present a hierarchical Bayesian framework for modeling the acquisition of verb argument constructions. It embodies a domain-general approach to learning higher-level knowledge in the form of inductive constraints (or overhypotheses), and has been used to explain other aspects of language development such as the shape bias in learning object…