Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only…

Researchers have long been puzzled by the challenge English passive constructions present for language learners, with adult-like comprehension and production emerging only around the age of 5. It has therefore been of significant interest that researchers of other languages, including the Bantu language Sesotho, have reported acquisition of the…

To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, "figure" (i.e., the moving entity) and "ground" (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic…

Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like "John was building a house" does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective…

Mental-content verbs such as "think," "believe," "imagine" and "hope" seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different,…