The Competition Between Processing and Discourse-Pragmatic Factors in Children's and Adults' Production of Adverbial -Clauses.

Purpose: This is the first study to investigate the combined effects of processing-based factors (i.e., clause length and clause order) and discourse-pragmatic factors (i.

Putting Complement Clauses into Context: Testing the Effects of Story Context, False-Belief Understanding, and Syntactic form on Children's and Adults' Comprehension and Production of Complement Clauses.

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's belief-based action. We also measured children's understanding of false belief in explicit false-belief tasks.

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.

Does evidentiality support source monitoring and false belief understanding? A cross-linguistic study with Turkish- and English-speaking children.

This study investigates the impact of evidentiality on source monitoring and the impact of source monitoring on false belief understanding (FBU), while controlling for short-term memory, age, gender, and receptive vocabulary. One hundred (50 girls) monolingual 3- and 4-year-olds from Turkey and the UK participated in the study in 2019. In Turkish, children's use of direct evidentiality predicted their source monitoring skills, which, in turn, predicted their FBU.

The Effects of Traffic Air Pollution in and around Schools on Executive Function and Academic Performance in Children: A Rapid Review.

This review summarises the extant literature investigating the relation between traffic-related air pollution levels in and around schools and executive functioning in primary-school-aged children. An electronic search was conducted using Web of Science, Scopus, and Education Literature Datasets databases (February 2020). Review articles were also searched, and forwards and backwards searches of identified studies were performed.

Do complement clauses really support false-belief reasoning? A longitudinal study with English-speaking 2- to 3-year-olds.

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds (23 female, Time 1 age range = 33-41 months) from middle-class families in the North-West of England took part in the study, which addresses a series of uncertainties in previous studies. We avoided the confound of using complement clauses in the false-belief tests, assessed complement-clause proficiency with a new comprehensive test designed to capture gradual development, and controlled for individual differences in executive functioning that could affect both linguistic and sociocognitive performance.

Multiword units lead to errors of commission in children's spontaneous production: "What corpus data can tell us?*".

Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently-encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word sequences that are infrequent and thus unfamiliar to them than for those that are frequent. In this study, we investigate whether children's knowledge of multiword sequences can explain a phenomenon that has long represented a key theoretical fault line in the study of language development: errors of subject-auxiliary non-inversion in question production (e.

Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora.

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments.

The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence-Picture Matching and Eye Movements.

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs ("The book that the boy is reading"). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g.

Interactions between givenness and clause order in children's processing of complex sentences.

Understanding complex sentences that contain multiple clauses referring to events in the world and the relations between them is an important development in children's language learning. A number of theoretical positions have suggested that factors like syntactic structure (clause order), iconicity (whether the order of clauses reflects the order of events), and givenness (whether information is shared between speakers) affect ease of comprehension. We tested these accounts by investigating how these factors interact in British English-speaking children's comprehension of complex sentences with adverbial clauses (after, before, because, if), while controlling for language level, working memory and inhibitory control.

Intention or Attention Before Pointing: Do Infants' Early Holdout Gestures Reflect Evidence of a Declarative Motive?

Gestures are the first signs of intentional communication within prelinguistic infants and can reflect various motives, including a declarative motive to share attention and interest. The ability to use gestures declaratively has been linked to later language development; therefore, it is important to understand the origins of this motive. Previous research has focused on the use of declarative pointing at around 12 months; however, other potential forms of declarative communication, such as holdout gestures, are yet to be studied in detail.

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.

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.

Iconicity affects children's comprehension of complex sentences: The role of semantics, clause order, input and individual differences.

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in children's speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this paper, we provide the most comprehensive experimental study to date.

Multiunit Sequences in First Language Acquisition.

Theoretical and empirical reasons suggest that children build their language not only out of individual words but also out of multiunit strings. These are the basis for the development of schemas containing slots. The slots are putative categories that build in abstraction while the schemas eventually connect to other schemas in terms of both meaning and form.

Can Infinitival to Omissions and Provisions Be Primed? An Experimental Investigation Into the Role of Constructional Competition in Infinitival to Omission Errors.

An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6-3;0 and 3;6-4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT-constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English-speaking children's infinitival to omission errors (e.g., *I want ___ jump now).

Exploring early communicative behaviours: A fine-grained analysis of infant shows and gives.

The ability to share and direct attention is a pre-requisite to later language development and has been predominantly studied through infant pointing. Precursors to pointing, such as showing and giving gestures, may display similar communication skills, yet these gestures are often overlooked. This may be due to difficulty in discerning these gestures in interaction.

Can the attention training technique turn one marshmallow into two? Improving children's ability to delay gratification.

The seminal Marshmallow Test (Mischel & Ebbesen, 1970) has reliably demonstrated that children who can delay gratification are more likely to be emotionally stable and successful later in life. However, this is not good news for those children who can't delay. Therefore, this study aimed to explore whether a metacognitive therapy technique, Attention Training (ATT: Wells, 1990) can improve young children's ability to delay gratification.

Converging and competing cues in the acquisition of syntactic structures: the conjoined agent intransitive.

In two studies we use a pointing task to explore developmentally the nature of the knowledge that underlies three- and four-year-old children's ability to assign meaning to the intransitive structure. The results suggest that early in development children are sensitive to a first-noun-as-causal-agent cue and animacy cues when interpreting conjoined agent intransitives. The same children, however, do not appear to rely exclusively on the number of nouns as a cue to structure meaning.

The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition.

This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses.

Productivity of Noun Slots in Verb Frames.

Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __want__, __see__, and __get__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and creativity of use in these slots.

Young children's understanding of denial.

Although a fair amount is known about young children's production of negation, little is known about their comprehension. Here, we focus on arguably the most complex basic form, denial, and how young children understand denial, when it is expressed in response to a question with gesture, single word, or sentence. One hundred twenty-six children in 3 age groups (Ms = 1 year 9 months, 2 years 0 months, and 2 years 4 months) witnessed an adult look into 1 of 2 buckets and then, in response to a question about whether the toy was in there, communicate either something positive (positive head nod, "yes," "it is in this bucket") or negative (negative head shake, "No," "It's not in this bucket").

Handling agents and patients: representational cospeech gestures help children comprehend complex syntactic constructions.

Gesture is an important precursor of children's early language development, for example, in the transition to multiword speech and as a predictor of later language abilities. However, it is unclear whether gestural input can influence children's comprehension of complex grammatical constructions. In Study 1, 3- (M = 3 years 5 months) and 4-year-old (M = 4 years 6 months) children witnessed 2-participant actions described using the infrequent object-cleft-construction (OCC; It was the dog that the cat chased).

Semantics of the transitive construction: prototype effects and developmental comparisons.

This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results.