Syntactic bootstrapping with clausal complements of adjectives.

Like verbs, adjectives pose a challenge to the young word learner in that some - like or - map onto properties that are detectable through the senses, while others - like - express abstract properties that have no reliable, physical correlate. Even for those adjectives whose properties are observable, how does a child know that one particular property is being highlighted above all others? The physical environment alone will not suffice. Just as with verbs, the child learning adjectives is faced with an inherent indeterminacy of meaning, which can only be resolved through the incorporation of cues originating from multiple sources.

Supporting adjective learning by children with Developmental Language Disorder: Enhancing metalinguistic approaches.

Background: Adjectives are essential for communication, conceptual development and academic success. However, they are semantically and syntactically complex and can be particularly challenging for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Surprisingly, language interventions have not typically focused on this important word class.

Perspective-Taking With Deictic Motion Verbs in Spanish: What We Learn About Semantics and the Lexicon From Heritage Child Speakers and Adults.

In English, deictic verbs of motion, such as can encode the perspective of the speaker, or another individual, such as the addressee or a narrative protagonist, at a salient reference time and location, in the form of an indexical presupposition. By contrast, Spanish has been claimed to have stricter requirements on licensing conditions for ("to come"), only allowing speaker perspective. An open question is how a bilingual learner acquiring both English and Spanish reconciles these diverging language-specific restrictions.

Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults.

Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun.

The study of questions.

Asking questions is a fundamental aspect of human nature. Languages all around the world encode interrogative constructions. It is therefore incumbent upon semanticists to capture the meaning of questions.

Crying helps, but being sad doesn't: Infants constrain nominal reference online using known verbs, but not known adjectives.

Speakers can make inferences about the meaning of new words appearing in an utterance based on the lexical semantics of other words that co-occur with them. Previous work has revealed that infants at 19 and 24 months of age can recruit the semantic selectional restrictions of known verbs (e.g.

The semantics of questions.

Pinning down the semantics of questions poses a challenge for the study of meaning. Unlike most declarative statements, questions cannot be assigned a truth value. They do not assert information about the world that can be easily verified as true or false, or accepted or rejected.

All Together Now: Disentangling Semantics and Pragmatics with in Child and Adult Language.

The way in which an event is packaged linguistically can be informative about the number of participants in the event and the nature of their participation. At times, however, a sentence is ambiguous, and pragmatic information weighs in to favor one interpretation over another. Whereas adults may readily know how to pick up on such cues to meaning, children - who are generally naïve to such pragmatic nuances - may diverge and access a broader range of interpretations, or one disfavored by adults.

Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese.

When presented with a novel verb in a transitive frame (X is Ving Y), young children typically select a causative event referent, rather than one in which agents engage in parallel, non-causative synchronous events. However, when presented with a conjoined-subject intransitive frame (X and Y are Ving), participants (even adults, as we show) are at chance. Although in some instances, children older than three can obtain above-chance-level performance, these experiments still appear to rely upon a within-experiment contrast with the transitive frame.

Slowly but Surely: Adverbs Support Verb Learning in 2-Year-Olds.

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, two-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"). But, they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk it") (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010).

Production and perception of listener-oriented clear speech in child language.

In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they - like adults - modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than normal speech.

Collectivity, Distributivity, and the Interpretation of Plural Numerical Expressions in Child and Adult Language.

Sentences containing plural numerical expressions (e.g., ) can give rise to two interpretations (collective and distributive), arising from the fact that their representation admits of a part-whole structure.

The Role of Cardinality in the Interpretation of Measurement Expressions.

The purpose of this brief article is to investigate four-year-olds' interpretation of attributive measure phrases (MPs), such as , and the role of cardinality in mediating children's responses. In two experiments, I demonstrate that children at this age are starting to recognize that such MPs refer to a property of an individual, such as weight per unit (rather than the weight of an entire collection). Accordingly, they distinguish between attributive and pseudopartitive MPs.