We address the question whether children can acquire mature use of higher-level grammatical choices from the linguistic input, given only general prior knowledge and learning biases. We do so on the basis of a case study with the dative alternation in English, building on a study by De Marneffe et al. (2012) who model the production of the dative alternation by seven young children, using data ...

In this paper I investigate some child and adult data from an acquisition corpus of spontaneous conversation of some North Norwegian (NN) dialects, focusing on the word order of wh-questions. As is well known, many dialects do not have a strict V2 requirement in this clause type, and this is often interpreted as a process of diachronic change in the direction of non-V2 (e.g. Vangsnes 2004, West...

Verb constructions with a reflexive marker are termed “reflexive constructions”. Reflexive in language acquisition research have been studied mainly within formal theoretical framework while focusing on developmental differences comprehension of syntactically bound or free pronominal elements. The present study aimed to determine the pathway Croatian by examining errors that children produce ea...

objectives: speech and language development is one of the main aspects of evolution in humans and is one of the most complex brain functions such that it is referred to as one of the highest cortical functions such as thinking, reading and writing. speech and language disorders are considered as a major public health problem because they cause many secondary complications in the childhood and a...

Pet-directed speech is strikingly similar to infant-directed speech, a peculiar speaking pattern with higher pitch and slower tempo known to engage infants' attention and promote language learning. Here, we report the first investigation of potential factors modulating the use of dog-directed speech, as well as its immediate impact on dogs' behaviour. We recorded adult participants speaking in ...

The hypothesis that young infants rely on prosodic cues in speech 10 bootstrap their way into syntax has received considerable attention in recent discussions of early language development (e.g., Gleitman, Gleitman, Landau, & Wanner, 1988; Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss, & Kennedy, 1987). The appeal of the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis is easy to understand. If the boun...

1. Introduction Word segmentation is one of the first problems infants must solve during language acquisition, where words must be identified in fluent speech. A number of weak cues to word boundaries are present in fluent speech, and there is evidence that infants are able to use many of these, including phonotactics However, with the exception of the last cue, all these cues are language-depe...

Previous studies have demonstrated that the statistical properties of adult generated free associates can predict the order of early word learning in children. In this paper, we investigate the cause of this phenomenon. We propose that early word learning may be driven by the contextual diversity of words in child directed speech, which is in turn correlated with an underlying associative struc...