In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said "the card with apples" meant the card with "nothing but" apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speaker's perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…

The present study aimed at investigating the Bhutanese rural and urban secondary students' English vocabulary size, vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) in practice, and the relationship between the two. The participants were 200 students (110 males and 90 females) from 11 to 16 years old from two different schools in Bhutan, 100 from each school.…

This qualitative study aimed to examine ways young children practice social skills and use language while playing the digital game Roblox in pairs, using a single electronic device, as framed through Vygotsky's Socio-cultural theory of learning. Roblox is a sandbox-style game comprising several mini-games, such as hide-and-seek simulators and…

This study investigated the longitudinal relationship between children's domain-general cognitive constraints underlying phonological and sentence processing development in a big sample of typically developing children. 104 children were tested on non-linguistic processing speed, phonological skills (phonological short term memory, phonological…

A significant body of literature has demonstrated that infants demonstrate a decline in sensitivity to nonnative sound contrasts by their first birthday, a transition often thought to be adaptive for later word learning. The present study investigated infants' sensitivity to these contrasts in a habituation-based discrimination and word learning…

In language courses, it is important to foster students' systematic thinking and to develop their competence to express, appreciate, criticize and reflect, in particular in such courses as classical Chinese, which aim to develop students' cultural and literature knowledge. Problem posing is a promising strategy to achieve this objective. However,…

Researchers agree that early literacy activities, like book sharing and parent-child play, are important for stimulating language development. We hypothesize that book sharing is most powerful because it elicits more interactive talk in young children than other activities. Parents of 43 infants (9-18 months) made two daylong audio recordings…

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Children's differing learning trajectories cross-linguistically have been at the forefront of gender acquisition research, often with conflicting results and conclusions. As a result, the source of children's different learning behaviors in gender acquisition has been unclear. I argue that children's gender acquisition is driven by the search for…

Previous comprehension studies using Picture Matching Tasks (PMT) have shown that, by the age of four, Spanish-speaking children have acquired the semantics of "estar" being able to calculate the implicature that a property introduced with "estar" does not hold independent of time as well as displaying some ability to integrate…

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which…

Measures of syntactic complexity such as mean length of T-unit have been common measures of language proficiency in studies of second language acquisition. Despite the ubiquity and usefulness of such structure-based measures, they could be complemented with measures based on usage-based theories, which focus on the development of not just…

In a body of empirical research, it has been observed that young children from across different linguistic communities adhered to a particular type of nonadult interpretation of disjunction: They appear to interpret disjunction conjunctively. Through three experiments with Japanese-speaking preschoolers, we investigate the source of this nonadult…