The present study investigates children's bias when interpreting novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. "kig donka") that refer to combinations of novel objects (kig and donka). More specifically, it investigates children's understanding of modifier-head relations of the compounds and their preference for HAS or LOCATED relations (e.g. a donka that HAS a…

In two experiments, one hundred ninety-two 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults heard a novel word for a target object and then were asked to extend the label to one of two test objects, one matching in shape-based object category (the shape match) and the other matching in a property other than shape (the property match). We independently…

This article describes in detail several explicit computational methods for approaching such questions in phonology as the vowel/consonant distinction, the nature of vowel harmony systems, and syllable structure, appealing solely to distributional information. Beginning with the vowel/consonant distinction, we consider a method for its discovery…

This study explores different frequency effects on children's interpretations of novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. "egg bag" as "bag FOR eggs"). We investigated whether four- to five-year-olds and adults use their knowledge of related compounds and their modifier-head relations (e.g. "sandwich bag (FOR)" or "egg white (PART-OF)") when explaining the…

Previous studies on the second language acquisition of telicity have suggested that learners can use morphosyntactic cues to interpret sentences as telic or atelic even in cases where the cues differ in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) (Slabakova, 2001, 2005; Gabriele, 2008; Kaku et al., 2008a, 2008b). The present study extends…

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

The current experiments address several concerns, both empirical and theoretical in nature, that have surfaced within the verb learning literature. They begin to reconcile what, until now, has been a large and largely unexplained gap between infants' well-documented ability to acquire verbs in the natural course of their lives and their rather…

Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

Background: The metalinguistic ability to cope with homonyms, that is, words having multiple unrelated meanings, emerges rather late in the course child language development. It is associated with specific neural activity and related to academic achievement and second language learning. This study is about homonyms that are at the same time…

Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences.…

Children use syntax as well as observations of events to learn verb meanings. This is known as syntactic bootstrapping. This dissertation investigated the origins and mechanisms of syntactic bootstrapping. Prior evidence suggested that two-year-olds, but not younger children, could use aspects of sentence structure to assign different…

The English plural is about the "number" of "individuals" in a "set" of "like kinds." Two-year-old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their production of the plural are related to aspects of meaning. In two Experiments plural productions were elicited from…

The shared features that characterize the noun categories that young children learn first are a formative basis of the human category system. To investigate the potential categorical information contained in the features of early-learned nouns, we examine the graph-theoretic properties of noun-feature networks. The networks are built from the…

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the…

We show that 4-year-olds assign the correct interpretation to antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) sentences because they have the correct representation of these structures. This representation involves Quantifier Raising (QR) of a Quantificational Noun Phrase (QNP) that must move out of the site of the verb phrase in which it is contained to…