Young children who hear more child-directed speech (CDS) tend to have larger vocabularies later in childhood, but the specific characteristics of CDS underlying this link are currently underspecified. The present study sought to elucidate how the structure of language input boosts learning by investigating whether repetition of object labels in…

Despite many years of investigation into implicit learning in nonlinguistic domains, the potential for implicit learning to deliver the kinds of generalizations that underlie natural language competence remains unclear. In a series of experiments, we investigated implicit learning of the semantic preferences of novel verbs, specifically, whether…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

Memory-based language processing (MBLP) is an approach to language processing based on exemplar storage during learning and analogical reasoning during processing. From a cognitive perspective, the approach is attractive as a model for human language processing because it does not make any assumptions about the way abstractions are shaped, nor any…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

The present study examined language production skills in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. A unique cued sentence generation task was created in order to reduce demands on memory and attention. Differences in sentence production abilities according to disease severity and cognitive impairments were assessed. Language samples were obtained from 20…

Assessed 2-year olds' ability to use semantic context to infer meanings of novel nouns and to retain those meanings. Found that children learned majority of novel words; however, they occasionally failed to choose the correct corresponding picture for a novel noun even when they understood the verb; also found a significant retention of newly…

Children at three age levels were administered Schutz and Keislar's word-span task using nouns, verbs and functors as stimuli. (Author/RM)

A total of 34 children, ages 2 and a half to 6, were presented with sentences for imitation that either violated or honored a prenominal adjective ordering rule, which requires that size adjectives must precede color adjectives. Two response measures were evaluated in terms of these sentence types: latency to begin a sentence imitation and recall…

Reports on experiments examining the semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs and its development in childhood. Differences in semantic organization are said to be a clue to age-related changes in performance with verbs. (AM)

Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of nonbizarre vs. bizarre pictorial elaboration on the paired-associate retention of noun pairs. Five and seven year old children served as subjects in the first two experiments and learned a list of common noun pairs by the study-test paired-associate method. Experiment 1 provided a…

The present study was conducted in order to evaluate pictorial elaboration effects in children's incidental paired-associate memory. The design of the experiment consisted of a 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 factorial with (1) grade level (kindergarten vs. second), (2) pictorial presentation (standard vs. elaborated), (3) list (two 14-pair lists of common noun…