(2021). Editorial. Language Acquisition. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT 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 the child’s acquisition task, including realistic

ABSTRACT The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features onto inflectional morphemes. Against this

ABSTRACT This study tests the role of verbal mediation during theory of mind processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Adolescents with ASD or typical development completed a false belief task while simultaneously performing a verbal or nonverbal load task. There was no group difference in false belief accuracy; however, under verbal load, the ASD group was relatively less efficient, with slower

ABSTRACT In English, the sentence Mary didn’t eat pizza or sushi is assigned the neither interpretation (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction has been attributed to the Disjunction Parameter

ABSTRACT This study addresses the question of whether gender agreement is impaired in SLI German. Article production and gender marking on articles were examined in three groups of German-speaking children: 10 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), 10 age-matched typically developing (TD) children, and 10 TD children who were on average two years younger. Gender marking on articles did not

ABSTRACT 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 behavior. Specifically, we ask whether children’s

ABSTRACT In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner’s confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner’s linguistic input. Crucially, this gradient parameter hypothesis obviates the need

ABSTRACT Experimental studies show that children have greater difficulty with wh-extraction from object position than subject position, arguably an intervention effect (e.g., Relativized Minimality). In this study we provide additional evidence of a S/O asymmetry in A’-dependencies from a novel source—sluicing. The results of our first comprehension study show that English-speaking 3–6-year-olds obey

ABSTRACT Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to all) in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical entries with some. Such is the case with some in English

ABSTRACT Producing pronouns involves linguistic and social-cognitive knowledge because children must learn words and understand pronouns’ changing referents. This study examined pronoun production longitudinally in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 15), whose social-cognition might impair pronoun use, and in typically developing (TD; n = 18) children. Modeling the effect of joint

ABSTRACT This Special Issue on linguistic and cognitive development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) arose from the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) (2017), when Jeannette Schaeffer, Stephanie Durrleman, and Inge-Marie Eigsti organized a symposium on this topic. It shows that the study of language development in ASD provides a unique perspective on the

ABSTRACT Previous research suggests that toddlers can rely on distributional cues in the input to track adjacent and nonadjacent grammatical dependencies. It remains unclear whether toddlers understand the hierarchical phrase structures that determine the corresponding grammatical dependencies. We addressed this question by testing toddlers on two different phrase structures in French that govern distinct

ABSTRACT Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents’ immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or full cues) part- and full phrases (without

ABSTRACT This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The aim is to delineate how the linguistic and extra-linguistic context affects referent accessibility to the speaker. The study also examines the degree to which accessibility effects are

ABSTRACT This project examines whether second-language (L2) learners can converge on a native-like pattern at the interface between syntax and discourse under low and high processing pressure, using Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) as a test case. The original version of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) predicts that L2 competence on syntax-discourse interface structures may diverge from

ABSTRACT In two artificial grammar learning experiments, we tested the learnability of tonal phonotactics forbidding non-domain-final rising tones (*NonFinalR) against the phonotactics banning non-domain-final high-level tones (*NonFinalH). We propose that a firm phonetic ground drives a presumably innate inductive bias favoring *NonFinalR and against *NonFinalH. In Exp. I, we trained two groups of

ABSTRACT Children’s sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguous wh-questions like Where did Annie explain that she rode her horse?, they preferentially associate the wh-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g., She explained at the campsite). This preferred association results in shorter syntactic

ABSTRACT Understanding that people’s ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4–5 years old by typically developing (TD) children. False-belief attribution remains difficult beyond this age for certain clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where delays in this realm are significant, and Developmental

ABSTRACT This study addresses the question as to what cognitive abilities influence performance on article choice and direct object scrambling in high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Schaeffer (2016/2018) shows that a group of 27 high-functioning Dutch-speaking children with ASD, aged 5–14, overgenerates the indefinite article, and fails to scramble significantly

ABSTRACT This article presents an acoustic study of the acquisition of vowel formant dynamics in L2 (Southern British) English by Polish learners at two levels of proficiency, along with baseline data from L1 English and L1 Polish. Results from our experiment suggest that the acquisition of English vowels by Polish learners entails a temporal reorganization such that vocalic targets in English are

ABSTRACT The goal of this brief article is to highlight a specific methodological consideration pertaining to the examination of linguistic transfer in sequential language acquisition: When and how can transfer be meaningfully disentangled from issues pertaining to developmental trajectories of the target language? While this methodological issue is relevant for all transfer studies irrespective of

ABSTRACT This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR account of pronouns on the coreference reading

ABSTRACT Resultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English resultative constructions. Two different experiments

ABSTRACT The acoustic realization of phrasal prominence is proposed to correlate with the order of V(erbs) and O(bjects) in natural languages. The present production study with 15 talkers of Japanese (OV) and English (VO) investigates whether the speech signal contains coverbal visual information that covaries with auditory prosody, in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech (IDS and ADS). Acoustic analysis

ABSTRACT 15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as wh-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a “gap-driven” interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that feed is transitive may notice that a predicted direct object is missing in Which monkey did the frog feed __

ABSTRACT It has been proposed that children differ from adults in that children license a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. The proposal is that children infer “A and B” from sentences of the form “A or B.” Although children’s conjunctive interpretations of disjunction have been reported in some studies, they have not been observed in other studies.

ABSTRACT Tests of vocabulary and verbal patterns in Jejueo and English reveal that the acquisition of the former language is in sharp decline, while progress in the latter language reaches a developmental plateau after high school. This dissertation investigates the acquisition of Jejueo and English on Jeju Island, a province of Korea located approximately 45 miles off the southern coast of the Korean

(2020). How seeing iconic gestures facilitates action event memory and verb learning in 3-year-old children. Language Acquisition: Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 68-70.

ABSTRACT This study proposes an explanatory account for the developmental stages of the acquisition of ser and estar in locative constructions. We propose that this copular distribution is regulated by two aspectual features, dynamicity and temporal boundedness. These features are crucial for the interpretation of nominals such as dinner, which refers to the physical food [–dynamic] with estar and

ABSTRACT The present study is designed to investigate whether children’s difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children’s comprehension of StSR with seem and Spanish-speaking children’s comprehension of StSR with parecer ‘seem,’ a configuration never before tested in this language. Spanish parecer is ambiguous between a functional

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to report results of an investigation into the production of a covert contrast by native speakers of Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish in the acquisition of the English distinction between the high front vowels /i/ and /ɪ/. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable acoustic distinction made by a language learner between target-language phonemes that is nevertheless

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system—epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [– epistemic] contexts, the selection of a subjunctive complement is especially

ABSTRACT This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using the cross-modal lexical priming technique, we

ABSTRACT Children begin to learn abstract rules at an early age, in an implicit way, without access to rule descriptions. They rely on specific rule instances that they encounter. However, rule instances often co-occur with rule-inconsistent instances. One kind of inconsistent input, non-application instances, constitutes a learnability problem. For example, a child might hear many instances of the

ABSTRACT We reexamine the distribution of nonfinite root forms (NRFs) in Child French on the basis of two novel spontaneous speech corpora focusing on two issues that have increasingly dominated recent analyses of French on the one hand and NRFs/RIs on the other. First, we argue that the level of NRF production peaking at ~24% is in line with the independent characterization of the language of exposure

ABSTRACT The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory, integrate and superpose in adult SLA. Learners

ABSTRACT One of the most intriguing questions in the investigation of second-language acquisition concerns the role of learners’ first language (L1). Comparing learners of different backgrounds (L1 German vs. L1 Romance languages), we aim to explore the acquisition of tense and aspect features in Spanish as a second language (L2). Findings show that the L1 indeed has an undeniable effect also visible

ABSTRACT This study investigates grammar learning strategies and the acquisition of L2 tense-aspect morphology through the retrospective think-aloud processes of a group of L3 learners of Catalan. A total of 18 students of Catalan in a university setting in Catalonia were asked to select one of three tense-aspect forms (preterite, imperfect, and perfect) in a short narrative written in the past. Retrospective

ABSTRACT Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children’s production of different types of passives, and

(2018). Acknowledging our reviewers. Language Acquisition: Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 339-340.

(2018). EOV Editorial Board. Language Acquisition: Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 454-454.

ABSTRACT It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the frequency account, the Competition Model, and the

ABSTRACT Children have been reported to prefer the surface scope or “isomorphic” reading of scopally ambiguous sentences (Musolino 1998, among others). Existing accounts in the literature differ with respect to the proposed source of this isomorphism effect. Some accounts are based on learnability considerations (e.g., Moscati & Crain 2014), while others invoke pragmatic and/or processing factors (e

ABSTRACT The two possible positions for wh-words (i.e., in situ or preposed) represent a long-standing area of research in French. The present study reports on statistical analyses of a new seminaturalistic corpus of child L1 French. The distribution of the wh-words is examined in relation to a new verb tripartition: Free be forms, the Fixed be form c’est ‘it is’, and Other Verbs. Results indicate

ABSTRACT Considering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR levels, of Spanish tense-aspect morphology: simple

ABSTRACT The wanna facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: Wanna is grammatical in certain contexts (Who do you want PRO to play with?) but not others (Who do you want who to play with you?). On a standard analysis, “contraction” to wanna is blocked by some empty constituents (WH-copies) but not others (PRO). All empty constituents are inaudible, so it has been unclear how restrictions

ABSTRACT Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in sentential complements to factive emotive predicates

ABSTRACT Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants’ sensitivity to grammatical violations (Sundara, Demuth & Kuhl 2011). This

ABSTRACT Word segmentation in L2 is not as optimal as in L1 because many, though not all, cues to signal word boundaries appear to be largely language-specific. Native English listeners use short-lag versus long-lag VOTs in segmenting pairs such as Lou spills versus loose pills. Polish contrasts negative versus short-lag VOTs, so speakers of Polish are expected to be largely insensitive to this English

(2018). Language properties and executive functions in the identification of SLI children in monolingual and bilingual populations. Language Acquisition: Vol. 25, The Identification of Children with Specific Language Impairment, pp. 1-4.

ABSTRACT The reference of understood subjects (ecs) in complement control (John persuaded Peteri eci to read the book) and temporal adjunct control (Johni tapped Peter while eci reading the book) has long been described as restricted to the object and subject of the main clause respectively. These restrictions have shaped the grammatical targets proposed for children, most of whom are reported as having

ABSTRACT This study argues that the pattern and timing of ordinal acquisition differs substantially from that of cardinals and is influenced by different language-specific factors, such as (ir)regular ordinal morphology, superlative morphology, and the singular-plural distinction. We discuss data from a Give X task (Wynn 1992) administered to 77 Dutch monolinguals (2;11–6;04) that support a so-called

ABSTRACT Very few studies exist on the role of cross-language similarities in cognate word acquisition. Here we sought to explore, for the first time, the interplay of orthography (O) and phonology (P) during the early stages of cognate word acquisition, looking at children and adults with the same level of foreign language proficiency and by using two variants of the word-association learning paradigm

ABSTRACT This study investigates L2 learners’ ability to use morphosyntactic gender as a predictive cue during the processing of Hindi agreement dependencies. Nine L2 learners of low-intermediate proficiency and nine highly proficient multilingual speakers who consider Hindi one of their dominant languages were tested using a speeded picture-selection task. Results indicate that both L2 learners and

ABSTRACT Sentences involving definite DPs can give rise to a “simultaneous” reading where the property expressed by the DP holds at the time introduced by the verb’s tense or an “indexical” reading where the property expressed by the DP holds at the utterance time. This article discusses an experiment showing that children prefer simultaneous readings to indexical readings. I argue that the findings

ABSTRACT This article examines children’s comprehension of the get-passive relative to the be-passive in an attempt to systematically compare the acquisition of both types of passives. It discusses the findings of two experiments (a picture-matching task and an act-out task) with children ages 36. Results from the picture-matching task indicate that 3-year-olds are above chance only with get-passives

ABSTRACT Bilinguals have been shown to differ from monolinguals especially in the realization and interpretation of phenomena that operate at the syntax/discourse interface. Hungarian has a well-known interface structure—identificational focus—which has been widely studied in the theoretical literature but never with bilinguals. The present article fills that gap, using three acceptability judgment

ABSTRACT To investigate cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences in grammatical gender in early bilingualism, we tested 12 simultaneous, 12 early successive bilingual Russian-German children, and 15 monolingual German children aged 8–9 years. An elicited production task in German shows that all bilingual children assign target gender to nouns, irrespective of whether nouns belong to the same

(2017). Acknowledging our reviewers. Language Acquisition: Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 281-281.