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Assessing the acquisition of Romani in Roma children Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Hristo Kyuchukov, Jill de Villiers, Yanwan Zhu, Iris Zhong
The paper presents the first comprehensive look at the language development of Romani-speaking children from resource-poor Roma communities in several European countries. 250 participants aged 3- t...
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Lexical skills in children with and without autism in the context of Arabic diglossia: Evidence from vocabulary and narrative tasks Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Muna Abd El-Raziq, Natalia Meir, Elinor Saiegh-Haddad
Arabic is characterized by diglossia, which involves the use of two language varieties within a single speech community: Spoken Arabic (SpA) for everyday speech and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for...
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Difficulties with pronouns in autism: Experimental results from Thai children with autism Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Nattanun Chanchaochai, Florian Schwarz
This paper explores the acquisition of personal reference terms in Thai, a language with a highly complex personal reference system. Two separate studies were conducted for this paper, each featuri...
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A case study of the American Sign Language patterns of a natively-exposed Deaf autistic signer Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Jenny L. Singleton, Kristin Walker, Richard P. Meier, Aaron Shield
Research on the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf autistic children has documented similarities to the linguistic profile of hearing children on the autism spectrum and has identi...
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Input factors in the acquisition of evidentiality by Turkish heritage language children and adults in the United States Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-05 Aylin Coşkun Kunduz, Silvina Montrul
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 comparin...
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English derived word recognition by Chinese‐English bilinguals: Testing the nature and time course of the component processes Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 Natalie G. Koval
Research utilizing morphological priming has found that L2 speakers show facilitation from derived L2 primes, which could suggest morphological processing during derived L2 word recognition. Howeve...
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Smashing verb learning through parental sound symbolic input in preterm and full-term children Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Şeref Can Esmer, Erim Kızıldere, Tilbe Göksun
Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children’s verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilit...
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Word-level reading skills of Brazilian children with developmental language disorder Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-08 Talita Fortunato-Tavares, Debora Befi-Lopes, John Orazem, Aparecido Soares
Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show a wide range of impairments, including poor pre-reading skills and decoding difficulties due to phonological deficits and such difficulties ...
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Obviating the mood, but mostly under control: Spanish heritage speakers’ acquisition of the binding constraints of desiderative complements Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-23 Silvia Perez-Cortes
ABSTRACT Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the anaphoric relations and binding constraints
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Verb agreement production in Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Fauzia Abdalla, Abdessattar Mahfoudhi
ABSTRACT Verb morphology difficulties have been widely attested in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak English and other languages. This research contributes data on a variety of Arabic, a richly inflected Semitic language. The current study examined the production of subject-verb agreement morphology in three groups of 30 monolingual Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. Ten
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The acquisition of Hindi split-ergativity and differential object marking by Dutch L1 speakers: systematicity and variation Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Aaricia Ponnet, Ludovic De Cuypere
We investigated the acquisition of Hindi split ergativity (zero or -ne marking) and Hindi differential object marking (DOM; zero or -ko marking) by L1 speakers of Dutch. Both grammatical phenomena ...
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Language acquisition and language processing: Finding new connections Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-06-06 John C. Trueswell
Published in Language Acquisition (Vol. 30, No. 3-4, 2023)
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Acquisition of Russian noun case by bilingual children: lexical cues to case assignment in real and novel words Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Anna Chrabaszcz, Nina Ladinskaya, Anastasiya Lopukhina
ABSTRACT The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n = 24) in different non-nominative cases (e.g.
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Relative clause production abilities of Hebrew-speaking children with ASD Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Nufar Sukenik
ABSTRACT Relative clauses (RCs) are complex syntactic structures because they consist of multiple clauses and involve syntactic movement. RCs are known as a reliable clinical marker of syntactic impairment across many different languages and populations. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with the comprehension and production of RCs, and it remains unclear whether these difficulties
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The study of children with developmental language disorder beyond English: a tutorial Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Laurence B. Leonard, Mariel L. Schroeder
ABSTRACT The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general. Benefits to children and local societies are also
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Arabic morpheme per utterance: a morphological measure of child language development in spoken Arabic Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Naila Tallas-Mahajna, Esther Dromi
Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utter...
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Parent American Sign Language skills correlate with child–but not toddler–ASL vocabulary size Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Lauren Berger, Jennie Pyers, Amy Lieberman, Naomi Caselli
Most deaf children have hearing parents who do not know a sign language at birth and are at risk of limited language input during early childhood. Studying these children as they learn a sign langu...
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Piecewise Structural Equation Modeling of the collective implicature in child language Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 John Grinstead, Ramón Padilla-Reyes, Melissa Nieves-Rivera, Morgan Oates
We test children’s distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with the o...
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Mapping modal verbs to meanings: an elicited production study on “force” and “flavor” with young preschoolers Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Ailís Cournane, Mina Hirzel, Valentine Hacquard
Modals (e.g., can, must) vary along two dimensions of meaning: “force” (i.e., possibility or necessity), and “flavor” (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], o...
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Acquiring recursive structures through distributional learning Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Daoxin Li, Kathryn D. Schuler
ABSTRACT Languages differ regarding the depth, structure, and syntactic domains of recursive structures. Even within a single language, some structures allow infinite self-embedding while others are more restricted. For example, when expressing ownership relation, English allows infinite embedding of the prenominal genitive -s, whereas the postnominal genitive of is much more restricted. How do speakers
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Non-verbal predicate negation in child Emirati Arabic Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Dimitrios Ntelitheos, Marta Szreder
We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) mub as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal pred...
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The Comprehension and Production of Passive Constructions by Afrikaans and isiXhosa First Language Grade 1 Children Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Joanine Hester Nel, Frenette Southwood, Michelle Jennifer White
The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existin...
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Acquisition of overt and covert and: support for the semantic subset principle Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Yoshiki Fujiwara, Hiroyuki Shimada
The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children’s consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives; the Semantic Subset Principle a...
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The repetition of relative clauses in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Haiyan Wang, Haopeng Yu
ABSTRACT This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children, and they tend to make errors involving the relativizer
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Parser-grammar transparency and the development of syntactic dependencies Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Jeffrey Lidz
ABSTRACT A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in developmental time to demonstrate that as new grammatical
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Not all English Resultative Constructions (ERCs) are equal: The acquisition of ERC by Spanish speakers Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Luis París, Maria Alejandra Celi, Ángel Tabullo, Mahayana C. Godoy
ABSTRACT The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish counterpart) by Spanish speaker learners of English
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Event-related potentials in the study of L2 sentence processing: A scoping review of the decade 2010-2020 Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Giada Antonicelli, Stefano Rastelli
ABSTRACT Event-related potentials (ERPs) have become widespread in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a growing body of literature has been produced in recent years. We surveyed 61 SLA papers that use ERPs to study L2 sentence processing in healthy late learners. Our main aim was to provide a critical summary of findings from the decade 2010-2020. The qualitative review reveals that proficiency
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English-learning preschoolers can correctly parse and interpret negative sentences to guide their interpretations of novel noun and verb meanings Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-11-25 Alex de Carvalho, Victor Gomes, John Trueswell
ABSTRACT We studied English-learning children’s ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive (“Mary didn’t blick the baby”) or negative-intransitive (“Mary didn’t blick”)
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Experiencer troubles: A reappraisal of the predicate-based asymmetry in child passives Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Athulya Aravind, Loes Koring
ABSTRACT Children’s understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as theoretically irrelevant. We instead propose a novel account
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Exploring syntactically encoded evidentiality Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-07-22 Nikos Angelopoulos, Dafni-Vaia Bagioka, Arhonto Terzi
ABSTRACT The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others’ authority or mental perspective, where “others” stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the experimenter or someone in the props). However, these studies
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Discourse with few words: Coherence statistics, parent-infant actions on objects, and object names Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-07-04 Hadar Karmazyn-Raz, Linda B. Smith
ABSTRACT Early object name learning is often conceptualized as a problem of mapping heard names to referents. However, infants do not hear object names as discrete events but rather in extended interactions organized around goal-directed actions on objects. The present study examined the statistical structure of the nonlinguistic events that surround parent naming of objects. Parents and 12-month-old
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Child heritage speakers’ acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive in volitional and adverbial clauses Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-06-29 Melisa Dracos, Pablo E. Requena
ABSTRACT The Spanish subjunctive mood (SUBJ) is said to be highly vulnerable in heritage language (HL) acquisition. However, there is little controlled research on HL-speaking children acquiring the various Spanish SUBJ contexts, so we do not have a clear picture of when, how, or why heritage speakers (HSs) develop in the SUBJ as they do. This study tests the development of the SUBJ in two of the earliest
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The differentiation of early word meanings from global to specific categories: Towards a verification of the “semantic pluripotency hypothesis” Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Hiromichi Hagihara
Published in Language Acquisition (Vol. 31, No. 1, 2024)
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Social biases can lead to less communicatively efficient languages Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Masha Fedzechkina, Lucy Hall Hartley, Gareth Roberts
ABSTRACT Language is subject to a variety of pressures. Recent work has documented that many aspects of language structure have properties that appear to be shaped by biases for the efficient communication of semantic meaning. Other work has investigated the role of social pressures, whereby linguistic variants can acquire positive or negative evaluation based on who is perceived to be using them.
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L2 representation and processing of Spanish focus Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-06-23 Tania Leal, Bradley Hoot
ABSTRACT Research on second-language (L2) acquisition has identified linguistic domains that appear to be especially difficult to learn—one such sticking point being syntactic structures that depend on the surrounding discourse. The Interface Hypothesis (IH) explains what makes such constructions problematic by appealing to a modular view of language, arguing that integrating knowledge from language-internal
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Development of a screening tool to identify babies at risk of language delay in India: A preliminary study Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Siddhi Pathak, Pallavi Sovani-Kelkar
ABSTRACT Early identification of language delay is important as it has a serious impact on a child’s life in terms of educational, social, and emotional development. Among the early language screening tools, there are some parent-administered tools; however, they are not culturally appropriate or freely available. This article documents the development and preliminary validation of a quick and easy-to-administer
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Learning to predict and predicting to learn: Before and beyond the syntactic bootstrapper Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Mireille Babineau, Naomi Havron, Isabelle Dautriche, Alex de Carvalho, Anne Christophe
ABSTRACT 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 hypothesis, children discover the semantic predictiveness of syntactic
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Correction Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-06-15
Published in Language Acquisition (Vol. 29, No. 3, 2022)
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A protracted developmental trajectory for English-learning children’s detection of consonant mispronunciations in newly learned words Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-05-31 Carolyn Quam, Daniel Swingley
ABSTRACT Children are adept at learning their language’s speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature
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Do children know whanything? 3-year-olds know the ambiguity of wh-phrases in Mandarin Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-05-13 Yu’an Yang, Daniel Goodhue, Valentine Hacquard, Jeffrey Lidz
ABSTRACT Wh-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English what) and an indefinite (like English a/some) interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and 4.5 do not reliably produce the indefinite interpretation in naturalistic speech
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Cognitive inhibition explains children’s production of medial wh-phrases Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Adam Liter, Elaine Grolla, Jeffrey Lidz
ABSTRACT Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child’s hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children’s productions of medial wh-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative account of these productions as performance errors arising
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Acquisition of emphatic consonants by Ammani Arabic-speaking children Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-04-25 Bassil Mashaqba, Aya Daoud, Wael Zuraiq, Anas Huneety
ABSTRACT This article investigates the production of the emphatic consonants /ṭ, ḍ, ṣ/ by typically developing Jordanian children. Sixty typically developing monolingual Ammani Arabic-speaking children (30 boys and 30 girls) with ages ranging from 2 to 7;11 years were recruited in a production experiment. In the experiment, they were asked to produce 18 minimal pair words with emphatic consonants and
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Fast passives, slow relatives Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Cecile McKee, Dana McDaniel, Merrill F. Garrett
ABSTRACT Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and three-clause structures in active and passive
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Acquisition of empathy in child Japanese Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-04-13 Akari Ohba, Kamil Ud Deen
ABSTRACT This article investigates the acquisition of empathy verbs in child Japanese, focusing on verbs of giving/receiving: age-ru ‘give,’ kure-ru ‘give,’ and mora(w)-u ‘receive.’ These verbs are distinguished by which argument the speaker empathizes with when describing an event. For age-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with the subject (the giver); for kure-ru ‘give,’ the speaker empathizes with
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Acquisition of English adjectival resultatives: Support for the Compounding Parameter Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Shuyan Wang, Yasuhito Kido, William Snyder
ABSTRACT Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations (“particles”) and adjectival resultatives (“ARs”). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter (“TCP”). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has acquired ARs or particles will also permit “creative” bare-stem, endocentric compounding
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Effects of age of acquisition and category size on signed verbal fluency Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2022-03-31 Onur Keleş, Furkan Atmaca, Kadir Gökgöz
ABSTRACT Using a free-recall paradigm, we explored the effects of age of acquisition and category size on verbal fluency in Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili [TİD]). We studied the semantic and phonological fluency task performances of deaf native and deaf late adult signers. We measured the number of correct responses and performed a time course analysis to observe how signers engage in lexical
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The extragrammaticality of the acquisition of adjunct control Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-12-10 Juliana Gerard
ABSTRACT Previous research on 4–6-year-olds’ interpretations of adjunct control has observed non-adult-like behavior for sentences like John called Mary before running to the store. Several studies have aimed to identify a grammatical source of children’s errors. This study tests the predictions of grammatical and extragrammatical accounts by comparing children’s behavior on two truth value judgment
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The effects of language input on word order in German as a heritage and majority language Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-12-02 Aldona Sopata, Kamil Długosz
ABSTRACT This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input—including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input—affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who had acquired German from birth and German monolinguals
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L2 within-language morphological competition during spoken word recognition Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-11-11 Ezequiel M. Durand-López
ABSTRACT Bilinguals recognize words with shared morphology and phonology cross-linguistically (i.e., cognates) faster than words that do not have these characteristics. Moreover, higher phonological overlap in cognates enhances the effects, which suggests that phonology eases word recognition. However, it is currently unclear whether words compete purely morphologically before spoken word recognition
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Word knowledge and lexical access in monolingual and bilingual migrant children: Impact of word properties Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-11-04 Magdalena Łuniewska, Marta Wójcik, Joanna Kołak, Karolina Mieszkowska, Zofia Wodniecka, Ewa Haman
ABSTRACT Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood bilingualism. However, a joint impact of these
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Learning embedded verb placement in Norwegian: Evidence for early overgeneralization Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Tina Ringstad, Dave Kush
ABSTRACT This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3–7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and two requiring a semantic-pragmatic generalization
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The link between lexical semantic features and children’s comprehension of English verbal be-passives Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-13 Emma Nguyen, Lisa Pearl
ABSTRACT Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal be-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as wh-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children’s performance on these passives can be affected by the verb’s lexical semantics. Through a meta-analysis of experimental studies assessing English-speaking
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Structural diversity does not affect the acquisition of recursion: The case of possession in German Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-10-13 Ana T. Pérez-Leroux, Yves Roberge, Alex Lowles, Petra Schulz
ABSTRACT Languages vary according to which morphosyntactic forms of embedding are present in the grammar as well as to which of these forms allow recursive embedding. The present study examines how German-speaking children discover which forms of embedding are recursive. In German, possessive modifiers are expressed by several structural options (i.e., genitive case, possessive -s, relative clauses
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The acquisition of wh-questions: Beyond structural economy and input frequency Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 An D. Nguyen, Geraldine Legendre
ABSTRACT We present in this article corpus analyses, two experiments, and a preliminary English-French comparison on children’s acquisition of wh-in-situ. Our examination of 10,000 wh-questions from CHILDES reveals that the reported empirical picture of wh-question acquisition in English is incomplete: A type of wh-in-situ, probe questions (PQs), has been left out from most discussions despite its
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L2 speech learning of European Portuguese /l/ and /ɾ/ by L1-Mandarin learners: Experimental evidence and theoretical modelling Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-08-24 Chao Zhou
(2022). L2 speech learning of European Portuguese /l/ and /ɾ/ by L1-Mandarin learners: Experimental evidence and theoretical modelling. Language Acquisition: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 105-106.
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Syntactic bootstrapping attitude verbs despite impoverished morphosyntax Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-08-09 Nick Huang, Aaron Steven White, Chia-Hsuan Liao, Valentine Hacquard, Jeffrey Lidz
ABSTRACT Attitude verbs like think and want describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, in which children assign belief semantics to
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Look at that: Spatial deixis reveals experience-related differences in prediction Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Tracy Reuter, Mia Sullivan, Casey Lew-Williams
ABSTRACT Prediction-based theories posit that interlocutors use prediction to process language efficiently and to coordinate dialogue. The present study evaluated whether listeners can use spatial deixis (i.e., this, that, these, and those) to predict the plurality and proximity of a speaker’s upcoming referent. In two eye-tracking experiments with varying referential complexity (N = 168), native English-speaking
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Considering the whole paradigm: Preschoolers’ comprehension of agreement is not uniformly late Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-05-21 Hannah Forsythe, Cristina Schmitt
ABSTRACT Many languages encode phi-features via overt morphology, yet children’s use of this morphology in comprehension tasks varies widely. Here, we use a picture-selection task to test comprehension of Spanish verbal agreement and clitics, comparing performance across and within each paradigm to examine the effect of two factors: (i) phonological salience, and (ii) semantic (under)specification
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Object relatives with postverbal subject in Italian-speaking children and adults: The role of encyclopedic knowledge in detecting sentence ambiguity Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-06-03 Marta Tagliani, Maria Vender, Chiara Melloni
ABSTRACT Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the mom’ are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic (im)plausibility in processing these ambiguous constructions. Italian
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Using ultrasound tongue imaging to study covert contrasts in second-language learners’ acquisition of English vowels Language Acquisition (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2021-05-26 Jae Yung Song, Fred Eckman
ABSTRACT Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language. In the present study, we aimed to extend the