ABSTRACT When asked to count using basic-level noun descriptions (e.g. fork), children often count both whole objects and “partial objects” (e.g. a broken fork-piece) as one unit, diverging systematically from adults. We test one class of explanations for this “over-counting” behavior: that children apply nouns to objects more permissively than adults, and then count those objects they have labeled with the noun. In a two-task study, we examined how categorization of a partial object under a count noun related to numerical evaluations of sets that included that object, including cases where the numerical expressions involved fractions. Adults categorized and counted partial objects conservatively, often excluding them from the category and counting them, at most, for a fractional share (1/2). Children were more permissive in both tasks: they frequently accepted partial objects as noun category members and counted them on par with wholes (as |1|). Strikingly, children’s numerical judgments were often incongruous with their categorization: They sometimes rejected a partial object as a category member, but still counted it as |1|. We argue that while children are indeed more flexible in their noun application, their counting behavior calls for a different account. We propose that children lack the numerical capacities to represent and reason over fractional amounts, and default to a natural number scale even when adults use a finer-grained measurement scale. Children may recognize that the partial fork contributes some non-zero amount to a sum, but the only way they can add it to that sum is as |1|.

ABSTRACT The goal of this research is to understand how bilingual and monolingual parents adjust their speech when talking to infants. We examined pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) with Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual parents and their infants (8–20 months of age). Thirty-eight parent-infant dyads participated in two naturalistic play tasks. Parents spoke with a bilingual researcher to collect samples of ADS. Results showed that both parent groups produced higher maximum and average fundamental frequency in IDS than ADS, suggesting that caregivers adjust pitch similarly in IDS across registers. However, for bilinguals, the IDS versus ADS difference was larger in English than Spanish; bilingual parents differentiated IDS adjustments across languages. The analyses across word repetitions revealed that in bilingual parents’ IDS, there was no change in pitch across the first and second repetitions of target words, even when repetitions occurred in different languages. Taken together, results suggest that bilingual parents adjust their IDS pitch similarly to English-speaking monolinguals, but they differentiate English and Spanish IDS adjustments. Overall, this project contributes to our understanding of parents’ register adjustments across multilingual language learning contexts.

ABSTRACT This study explored the effects of entrenchment, preemption, and verb semantics on Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ ability to retreat from overgeneralization errors in English transitive and intransitive constructions. Two groups of Chinese EFL learners were required to rate the acceptability of 60 transitive and intransitive verbs within their respective constructions. The findings revealed that Chinese EFL learners were sensitive to entrenchment, preemption and semantic constraints. This indicates that these learners restricted the generalization of transitive and intransitive constructions by relying on statistical verb-bias information and semantic constraints. Moreover, the awareness of these constraints among Chinese EFL learners substantially improved as their English proficiency advanced. The study’s findings highlight the importance of frequency and distributional information in language learning, demonstrating that learners used statistical patterns to guide their grammatical judgments. These findings support usage-based approaches to second language acquisition and shed light on the “Baker’s Paradox”

ABSTRACT The study examines factors affecting young children’s ability to derive relevance implicatures, which we define as implied meanings that need to be computed by a comprehender with reference to what constitutes a relevant message in a given conversational context. Young children have more difficulty understanding such implicatures compared to their comprehension of truth-functional propositions. Factors explaining this difficulty may include the overall complexity of the inferential process and the cognitive cost of decoding linguistic symbols in parallel with reasoning about speaker intentions. The study investigates these hypotheses by assessing 3- to 6-year-old Hungarian-speaking children’s implicature derivation behavior under different conditions. The children watched animated stories where one of the characters expressed a request. Their task was to choose from a set of pictures the one depicting the desired outcome of the story. The expression of the requests varied in the degree of relevance of the communicative cues it contained (conventional cues of high relevance versus unconventional cues of low relevance) and in the linguistic processing load of those cues (non-verbal, simple sentences and complex sentences). In addition to the implicature derivation task, children also completed cognitive tasks measuring executive functioning and structural language proficiency. We found that cue relevance had the greatest effect on the children’s ability to derive implicatures at all ages: Both verbal and non-verbal cues of high relevance significantly aided the inferential process compared to cues of low relevance. The cognitive cost of decoding language did not interfere with performance. Regression models predicting implicature derivation performance revealed, however, that receptive syntactic skills and, to a lesser extent, receptive vocabulary had an effect over and above the effect of age. We discuss possible explanations for the emergence of this pattern with reference to the roles of cognitive resources and structural language skills in pragmatic inference ability.

ABSTRACT Although extensive research has been conducted on bilingual vocabulary acquisition, there is still no consensus on how to assess vocabulary development in bilingual or multilingual children under three, given the complexity of learning words in two languages. This study investigates the developmental trajectories of productive and receptive vocabularies in 157 preschool-aged mono- and bilingual children aged 3 to 6, specifically focusing on Turkish-German bilingual children. We aimed to build on existing research to confirm and extend findings on vocabulary development in young bilingual children. Longitudinal data analysis revealed that bilingual children show weaker vocabulary skills in both modalities compared to same-aged monolinguals, yet demonstrate accelerated vocabulary expansion within a short timeframe. The vocabulary gap between bilingual and monolingual children is primarily thought to result from the more limited exposure to each language. The acquisition of language-independent conceptual knowledge may help facilitate transfer effects, allowing bilingual children to experience accelerated vocabulary growth under favorable exposure conditions, thereby helping them to gradually close the vocabulary gap.

ABSTRACT This study examines how two aspects of linguistic context, semantic richness and object novelty, impact verb-action mapping. Third-grade Mandarin-speaking children (N = 222) heard exemplars of novel English verbs while observing action scenes under four conditions: a rich semantic context with or without a novel object (e.g. “The cat is terjecking the pig/the doron.”); a sparse semantic context with or without a novel object (e.g. “He is terjecking her.”). The results of a verb extension test indicated that L2 verb learning was inferior in the rich semantic context involving a novel object label, in comparison to the other three contexts. A second experiment revealed that pre-exposure to the novel object’s label did not facilitate subsequent verb learning in the rich semantic context; instead, it impaired performance in the sparse context. Learners’ digit span was related to verb learning performance in the rich semantic context but not in the sparse semantic context. These findings suggest that L2 children can abstract a verb’s meaning regardless of semantic richness and the presence of a novel object. However, verb learning can be disrupted when L2 children are required to process an additional novel word either during or before the verb-action mapping process.

ABSTRACT The acquisition of variation is a fundamental – but poorly understood – part of child language acquisition. We fully endorse Shin and Miller’s call for us to recognize the importance of this core issue, and argue that our understanding could be further enriched by greater reliance on convergent methods. As such, we implore researchers to consider perception as well as production data, and to consider acquisition across different domains and different populations of children.

ABSTRACT Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants’ initial interpretation of novel nouns referring to novel animate objects in dynamic events includes not only the novel agents but also their actions. The following two contrastive hypotheses were specifically tested: (1) infants map novel verbs to the novel actions only and novel nouns to the novel agents only. Alternatively, (2) they map novel verbs to the novel actions only but novel nouns to both the novel agents and their actions. Infants watched dynamic events in which novel agents performed novel intransitive actions, while hearing novel words in a noun phrase or a verb sentence. When novel words were preceded by a pronoun “il”, infants were able to map novel verbs to the actions but not to the agents. However, when novel words were preceded by a determiner “un”, they mapped the novel nouns to both the agents and their actions. Two follow-up noun experiments showed that they mapped the novel nouns onto the agents and their actions, even when additional noun morphosyntactic cues were given. These findings demonstrate that 20-month-old infants are able to use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially and provide some evidence to support that infants’ initial representations of novel nouns referring to novel animate objects in dynamic events include both the agents and their actions.

ABSTRACT Phonological models of early word learning often assume that child forms can be understood as structural mappings from their adult targets. In contrast, the whole-word phonology model suggests that on beginning word production children represent adult targets as holistic units, reflecting not the exact sound sequence but only the most perceptually salient elements or those that align with their own vocal patterns. Here we ask whether the predictions of the whole-word model are supported by data from children learning Japanese or Mandarin, both languages with phonotactic structures differing from any so far investigated from this perspective. The Japanese child word forms are found to include some characteristics suggestive of whole-word representation, but in Mandarin we find little or no such evidence. Instead, some children are found to make idiosyncratic use of whole syllables, substituting them for target syllables that they match in neither onset nor rime. This result, which neither model anticipates, forces reconsideration of a key tenet of the whole-word model – that early word production is based on word-size holistic representations; instead, at least in some languages, the syllable may serve as the basic representational unit for child learners.