Recent successes teaching chimpanzees to engage in symbolic communication have again brought into question the Cartesian supposition that language is uniquely possessed by homo sapiens. Despite the very remarkable achievements of Washoe and Sarah, an objective comparison of these chimps' linguistic performances with those of a typical 3-year-old child provides scant evidence for rejecting Desca...

The present study aims at the description and analysis of the phonological and lexical development of a child who is acquiring Farsi as his first language. The child's language production at the holophrastic stage of language development, mainly single words, is observed and recorded  longitudinally for nearly seven  months since he was 16 months old until he turned 23 months. An attempt is mad...

Existing work on the acquisition of syntax has been concerned mainly with the early stages of syntactic development. In the present study we examine later syntactic development in children. Also, existing work has focused on commonalities in the emergence of syntax. Here we explore individual differences among children and their relation to variations in language input. In Study 1 we find subst...

Despite the significant advances in syntactic parsing of written text, the application of these techniques to spontaneous spoken language has received more limited attention. The explosive growth of available corpora of transcribed spoken language opens up new opportunities in that direction. High accuracy parsers for spoken language will in turn provide a platform for development of a wide ran...