We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective…

Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…

Learners preferentially interpret novel nouns at the basic level ('dog') rather than at a more narrow level ('Labrador'). This 'basic-level bias' is mitigated by statistics: children and adults are more likely to interpret a novel noun at a more narrow label if they witness 'a suspicious coincidence' -- the word applied to three exemplars of the…

This study investigates children's interpretation of sentences with two logical operators: Dutch universal modal "hoeven" and negation ("niet"). In adult Dutch, "hoeven" is an NPI that necessarily scopes under negation, giving rise to a NOT > NECESSARY reading. The findings from a hidden-object task with 5- and…

There is a debate as to whether topic structures in Chinese involve A'-movement or result from base-generation of the topic in the left periphery. If Chinese topicalization was derived by movement, under the assumptions of Friedmann et al.'s Relativized Minimality (Lingua 119:67-88, 2009), we would expect children's comprehension of object…

Syntactic abilities vary across individuals. Weak syntax is typically ascribed to limited competence (knowledge) or poor performance (processing). However, with many questioning this dichotomy, alternative explanations should be considered. Arguments related to language exposure are insufficient because language-impaired children often have good…

Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2- to 6-year-old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities ("seven, most") and qualities ("red, spotty") present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding, not only of what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning…

Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong…

Recent work on the acquisition of number words has emphasized the importance of integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives [Musolino, J. (2004). The semantics and acquisition of number words: Integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives. "Cognition 93", 1-41; Papafragou, A., Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Scalar…

The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, affects English-speaking children's compound segmentation. This finding is consistent with a usage-based theory of language acquisition, whereby children learn abstract underlying linguistic structure through their experience with particular…