Why learners privilege word-order over case-marking: A cross-linguistic meta-analysis, new data from Estonian, Finnish and Polish, and a discriminative learning model.

Language acquisition is one of the crowning achievements of our species; though a long-standing and unresolved question is why many learners struggle with a particular core and fundamental sentence type. In English, a two-participant sentence like can mean only one thing. But in many languages worldwide, the meaning of the sentence can be flipped (e.

Novel cVEMP procedure reveals sexual dimorphism in peak to trough latency.

Introduction: Sex difference in latency for cervical vestibular-evoked myogenic potential (VEMP) has been reported in Brown Norway rats. Human investigations of sex difference in VEMP latency have shown inconsistent results, although there are indicators of sexual dimorphism in vestibular function and a higher reporting rate for vestibular disorder in women than in men.

Methods: Sex effects in human VEMP were re-evaluated here using a procedure adapting clinical protocols for higher sensitivity.

Shifting toward progressive and balanced interaction: A longitudinal corpus study of children's responses to Who-questions in Japanese.

Children's speech becomes longer and more complex as they develop, but the reasons for this have been insufficiently studied. This study examines how changing linguistic choices in children are linked to interactive factors by analysing Who-question sequences in Japanese child-caregiver conversations. The interactive factors in focus are progressivity and balanced joint activity, which are core aspects of conversational interaction.

Adult stuttering prevalence II: Recalculation, subgrouping and estimate of stuttering community engagement.

Purpose: Epidemiological research of stuttering has frequently focused on children, with a relative paucity of population level data specific to adults. Prevalence data for adults are reassessed here, including a breakdown of whether stuttering is overt or covert, and whether onset was in childhood or adulthood. The engagement of adults who stutter with stuttering communities is also estimated.

Children learn ergative case marking in Hindi using statistical preemption and clause-level semantics (intentionality): evidence from acceptability judgment and elicited production studies with children and adults.

A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields , etc, with exceptions and ).

The acquisition of English modal constructions: a corpus-based analysis.

The English modal system is complex, exhibiting many-to-one, and one-to-many, form-function mappings. Usage-based approaches emphasise the role of the input in acquisition but rarely address the impact of form-function mappings on acquisition. To test whether consistent form-function mappings facilitate acquisition, we analysed two dense mother-child corpora at age 3 and 4.

Building a unified model of the Optional Infinitive Stage: Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder.

Verb-marking errors are a characteristic feature of the speech of typically-developing (TD) children and are particularly prevalent in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, both the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and the pattern of verb-marking deficit in DLD vary across languages and interact with the semantic and syntactic properties of the language being learned. In this paper, we review work using a computational model called MOSAIC.

Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K'iche'.

How do language learners avoid the production of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors ( c.f. ), while retaining the ability to apply such generalizations productively when appropriate? This question has long been seen as one that is both particularly central to acquisition research and particularly challenging.

Weak Vestibular Response in Persistent Developmental Stuttering.

Vibrational energy created at the larynx during speech will deflect vestibular mechanoreceptors in humans (Todd et al., 2008; Curthoys, 2017; Curthoys et al., 2019).

Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children's and Adults' Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive.

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained, varying according to the distance between the semantics of the verb and those of the construction. In a forced-choice pointing study (Experiment 1), both 4- to 6-year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) showed support for the prediction of this semantic construction prototype account of an interaction such that the observed disadvantage for passives as compared to actives (i.

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'.

This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man, across three age groups (5-6 years, 9-10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g.

Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD: Elicited production of passives.

Children with ASD and an IQ-matched control group of typically developing (TD) children completed an elicited-production task which encouraged the production of reversible passive sentences (e.g., "Bob was hit by Wendy").

How the input shapes the acquisition of verb morphology: Elicited production and computational modelling in two highly inflected languages.

The aim of the present work was to develop a computational model of how children acquire inflectional morphology for marking person and number; one of the central challenges in language development. First, in order to establish which putative learning phenomena are sufficiently robust to constitute a target for modelling, we ran large-scale elicited production studies with native learners of Finnish (N = 77; 35-63 months) and Polish (N = 81; 35-59 months), using a novel method that, unlike previous studies, allows for elicitation of all six person/number forms in the paradigm (first, second and third person; singular and plural). We then proceeded to build and test a connectionist model of the acquisition of person/number marking which not only acquires near adult-like mastery of the system (including generalisation to unseen items), but also yields all of the key phenomena observed in the elicited-production studies; specifically, effects of token frequency and phonological neighbourhood density of the target form, and a pattern whereby errors generally reflect the replacement of low frequency targets by higher-frequency forms of the same verb, or forms with the same person/number as the target, but with a suffix from an inappropriate conjugation class.

Is Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From a Grammaticality Judgment Study of Indonesian.

A central debate in the cognitive sciences surrounds the nature of adult speakers' linguistic representations: Are they purely syntactic (a traditional and widely held view; e.g., Branigan & Pickering, ), or are they semantically structured? A recent study (Ambridge, Bidgood, Pine, Rowland, & Freudenthal, ) found support for the latter view, showing that adults' acceptability judgments of passive sentences were significantly predicted by independent semantic "affectedness" ratings designed to capture the putative semantics of the construction (e.

Testing an input-based account of children's errors with inflectional morphology: an elicited production study of Japanese.

This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system, which shows substantial by-verb variation in the frequency distribution of past and nonpast forms. 22 children aged 3;2-5;8 (Study 1) and 26 children aged 2;7-4;11 (Study 2) completed elicited production studies designed to elicit past and nonpast forms of 20 verbs (past-biased and nonpast-biased).

Horses for courses: When acceptability judgments are more suitable than structural priming (and vice versa).

Although structural priming is often the most suitable paradigm, it sometimes misses effects that are detected by more sensitive acceptability-judgment tasks, thus yielding incorrect conclusions. For example, Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) claim that "syntactic representations do not contain semantic information" (sect. 2.

Children's Acquisition of the English Past-Tense: Evidence for a Single-Route Account From Novel Verb Production Data.

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g.

The Effects of Animacy and Syntax on Priming: A Developmental Study.

Sentence production relies on the activation of semantic information (e.g., noun animacy) and syntactic frames that specify an order for grammatical functions (e.

The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology.

Four- and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the target form, and with the phonological neighbourhood density of the noun.

Disentangling Effects of Input Frequency and Morphophonological Complexity on Children's Acquisition of Verb Inflection: An Elicited Production Study of Japanese.

This study aims to disentangle the often-confounded effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of inflection, by focusing on simple and complex verb forms in Japanese. Study 1 tested 28 children aged 3;3-4;3 on stative (complex) and simple past forms, and Study 2 tested 30 children aged 3;5-5;3 on completive (complex) and simple past forms, with both studies using a production priming paradigm. Mixed effects models for children's responses were built to test the prediction that children's verb use is explained by the relative bias in input frequency between the two inflectional forms.

A randomised controlled trial to test the effect of promoting caregiver contingent talk on language development in infants from diverse socioeconomic status backgrounds.

Background: Early language skills are critical for later academic success. Lower socioeconomic status (SES) children tend to start school with limited language skills compared to advantaged peers. We test the hypothesis that this is due in part to differences in caregiver contingent talk during infancy (how often the caregiver talks about what is in the focus of the infant's attention).

What Paves the Way to Conventional Language? The Predictive Value of Babble, Pointing, and Socioeconomic Status.

A child's first words mark the emergence of a uniquely human ability. Theories of the developmental steps that pave the way for word production have proposed that either vocal or gestural precursors are key. These accounts were tested by assessing the developmental synchrony in the onset of babbling, pointing, and word production for 46 infants observed monthly between the ages of 9 and 18 months.

Lexical distributional cues, but not situational cues, are readily used to learn abstract locative verb-structure associations.

Children must learn the structural biases of locative verbs in order to avoid making overgeneralisation errors (e.g., (∗)I filled water into the glass).

Comparing generativist and constructivist accounts of the use of the past tense form in early child Japanese.

The present study investigated children's early use of verb inflection in Japanese by comparing a generativist account, which predicts that the past tense will have a special default-like status for the child during the early stages, with a constructivist input-driven account, which assumes that children's acquisition and use of inflectional forms reflects verb-specific distributional patterns in their input. Analysis of naturalistic data from four Japanese children aged 1;5 to 2;10 showed that there was substantial by-verb variation in the use of inflectional forms from the earliest stages of verb use, and no general preference for past tense forms. Correlational and partial correlational analyses showed that it was possible to predict the proportional frequency with which the child produced verbs in past tense versus other inflectional forms on the basis of differences in the proportional frequency with which the verb occurred in past tense form in the child's input, even after controlling for differences in the rate at which verbs occurred in past tense form in input averaged across the caregivers of the other children in the sample.