New motor skills supply infants with new possibilities for action and have consequences for development in unexpected places. For example, the transition from crawling to walking is accompanied by gains in other abilities--better ways to move, see the world, and engage in social interactions (e.g., Adolph & Tamis-LeMonda, 2014). Do the…

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners' prior expectations about how component units co-occur. In this study, we investigated how adults' prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning…

Interventions focused on the home language environment have been shown to improve a number of child language outcomes in the first years of life. However, data on the longer-term effects of the intervention are still somewhat limited. The current study examines child vocabulary and complex speech outcomes (N = 59) during the year following…

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as "uh-oh," "hi," "more," "up," and "all-gone," are typically among the first to…

The present paper aims to investigate the interplay of lexical and grammatical development in school-aged Greek-Albanian bilingual children by providing evidence both from majority, Greek, and heritage, Albanian. To this end, 47 8 to 10-year-old bilingual children were tested by means of expressive vocabulary tests in Greek and in Albanian, while…

Research on the acquisition of Mayan languages has shown child-directed communication (CDC) to be low in frequency. Nevertheless, long-term linguistic-anthropological research with the Tsotsil Mayan in Southern Mexico has documented episodes in family life when children engage in interactional routines or interactional formats (IFs) with their…

There has been increasing L3 research on L3 transfer selectivity, especially concerning which factor triggers crosslinguistic influence during L3 acquisition. According to Slabakova's (2016) Scalpel Model, every linguistic property has distinct and unique input factors regarding L3 acquisition such as high/low frequency or positive/negative input.…

Background: Although language difficulties are one of the most distinctive characteristics of the neuropsychological profile of children with sex chromosome trisomies (SCT), the analysis of the maternal input addressed to them is a neglected topic. Aims: The present study aims to analyse the lexical, morphosyntactic, and functional features of the…

Examining how bilingual infants experience their dual language input is important for understanding bilingual language acquisition. To assess these language experiences, researchers typically conduct language interviews with caregivers. However, little is known about the reliability of these parent reports in describing how bilingual children…

An underexplored question, and one with potentially far-reaching implications for the practice of written corrective feedback (WCF), is whether to mark a wide range of errors (comprehensive feedback) or to focus on a few error types (focused feedback) in learners' L2 writing. Despite limited evidence, it is argued that comprehensive WCF is…

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stephen Krashen developed Monitor Theory--a group of hypotheses explaining second language acquisition with implications for language teaching. As the L2 scholarly community began considering what requirements theories should meet, Monitor Theory was widely criticized and dismissed, along with its teaching…

A selective literature review by Hall and Dills ([2020]. The Limits of "Communication Mode" as a Construct. "Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education.") (EJ1273461) recently argued that limitations in communication mode as a construct prevent empirical research from discovering what type(s) of early language input optimise…

In this study we investigated the impact of parental language input on language development and associated neuroscillatory patterns in toddlers at risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Forty-six mother-toddler dyads at either high (n = 22) or low (n = 24) familial risk of ASD completed a longitudinal, prospective study including free-play,…