Quantifiers (some, all), numerals (two, three), and logical connectors (and, or) belong to the class of logical expressions that convey abstract and complex meaning, denoting properties of sets or relations between sets. In this paper, we show that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), who display severe deficits in spatial and numerical cognition, and mild-to-moderate intellectual disability, can nevertheless carry out the semantic computations necessary for understanding these expressions. We report data from two experiments testing knowledge of (a) the set-theoretic properties of basic English quantifiers, numerals, and connectors and (b) the logical consequences of these properties (i.e. entailment relations). We compared the performance of 32 adults with WS and 32 neurotypical adult speakers of English. In Experiment 1, people with WS performed significantly above chance (and close to ceiling) on the tests that evaluate the truth-conditional meaning of logical expressions. Moreover, in trials that permit both a strictly logical interpretation and a pragmatically enriched interpretation involving an implicature, speakers with WS and neurotypical adults displayed similar interpretive preferences. In Experiment 2, the WS group scored correctly on more than 90% of trials that evaluated knowledge of the felicity conditions associated with each expression. We interpret these findings as evidence of deep semantic and pragmatic representations in people with WS, notwithstanding their other limitations. We maintain that the relatively small differences in performance between neurotypical adults and individuals with WS are a matter of degree, not of kind. This conclusion allows us to move beyond the question of whether language development in WS is "typical" and instead focus on the underlying computational mechanisms that support language use and understanding in adults with WS. We discuss our results in the context of questions about the independence of language from other cognitive systems, and more generally, the modularity debate.
Using semantic dependency analysis, this study examines narrative productions from Mandarin-speaking preschool children aged three to six to investigate how semantic organization develops with age in early childhood. Four semantic dependency treebanks were constructed from a Chinese narrative corpus available in the CHILDES database. By comparing semantic dependency types and semantic dependency distances across the four age groups, we found that (1) semantic organization shifted from experiencer and classification relations toward agent and patient relations, situational-role relations (particularly those involving measurement, individuation, and direction), and structural relations; (2) mean semantic dependency distance (MSDD) increased with age, as adjacent dependencies decreased and longer dependencies became more frequent. This increase in MSDD indicates growing complexity in semantic organization and is largely driven by significant increases in the MSDD values of specific semantic dependency types. These findings provide new evidence for semantic organization development in preschool children.
In Mandarin Chinese, the causative alternation can be explained in terms of semantic factors, in particular the direct causation constraint and modes of causation. Despite these semantic regularities, it remains unclear whether Mandarin-speaking children draw on such constraints in acquiring the causative alternation, particularly given the prevalence of apparently inconsistent mappings at the syntax-semantics interface in Mandarin. This study involves three experiments using a video-verification task to examine whether 4- and 5-year-old Mandarin-acquiring children rely on semantic constraints to identify the causativizable intransitives. Experiment 1 examined whether Mandarin-acquiring children are sensitive to the direct causation constraint in interpreting lexical causative sentences derived from alternating verbs. Experiment 2 investigated whether the children appeal to the direct causation constraint in interpreting artificially constructed lexical causatives with non-alternating intransitive verbs. Experiment 3 tested whether Mandarin-speaking children make use of modes of causation in understanding artificially created lexical causatives containing non-alternating intransitive verbs with either an unspecified mode of causation, or a specified internal cause for the causative events. Results show that Mandarin-acquiring children aged between 4-5 and 5-6 only permitted the direct causative reading for lexical causative sentences, regardless of whether such sentences are attested in adult language. Moreover, they showed significantly higher acceptance of causative interpretations for verbs with an unspecified mode of causation than for internally caused verbs. The three experiments jointly corroborate the fundamental role of the form-meaning mapping regularities and verb semantic properties in Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the causative alternation.
Previous research has shown that children's referential choices are influenced by pragmatic factors in discourse (e.g., prior mention) and perceptual contexts (e.g., joint attention). However, most studies focused primarily on the verbal modality, with relatively little attention paid to children's multimodal referential competence. To address this gap, the present study examined Mandarin-speaking children's verbal and non-verbal referential acts in relation to the discourse factor, prior mention, and the perceptual factor, joint attention, during early childhood, with the aim of elucidating children's increasing sensitivity to these discourse-pragmatic factors and their developing communicative ability. The dataset comprised 12 hours of natural conversations between Mandarin-speaking mother-child dyads. Children's referential choices of the modalities and expressions were analyzed in terms of the two pragmatic factors (i.e., prior mention and joint attention). The results indicate that, from the earliest stage observed, children systematically differentiated newly introduced and previously mentioned referents in the modalities and referential expressions. They provided more information for new referents involved in joint attention via cross-modal referential acts, while relying on verbally informative expressions for new referents when joint attention was absent; conversely, previously mentioned referents were typically expressed with verbally reduced forms and usually without accompanying non-verbal acts. Cross-modal acts consistently served to identify new referents with joint attention in children's usage across developmental stages and interactional contexts. Taken together, these findings suggest that children's referential choices in both modalities reflect their emerging communicative and pragmatic abilities. This study advances understanding of Mandarin-speaking children's multimodal referential ability by demonstrating how they integrate multimodal expressions of reference and how their non-verbal acts evolve alongside speech as they become more linguistically proficient.
Adults face many challenges in acquiring a second language, some of which have been attributed to learning from more segmented linguistic units compared to children. Children draw on both single words and multiword units (crossing lexical boundaries) in language learning, with multiword units used to learn about grammatical relations between words. Adults are less likely to learn from multiword units, because of their existing knowledge of words. Indeed, when adults are encouraged to rely on multiword units, by manipulating the auditory input they hear, they show better learning of grammatical relations. Here, we investigate a novel way to increase adults' reliance on multiword units: we show that orthographic changes can encourage reliance on larger units and facilitate learning of grammatical relations in both adults and children learning Greek. In Study 1, we find that adults learn article-noun gender agreement better when the article-noun sequence is written as a single unsegmented word compared to two separate words. In Study 2, we replicated these findings, again showing that learning article-noun agreement from multiword units enhances performance for article-noun agreement, but does improve generalization of the learned grammatical classes to noun-adjective agreement. In Study 3, we find that children (ages 7-11) also show better learning of article-noun agreement when exposed to unsegmented text. These findings provide further support for the benefit of learning grammatical relations from multiword units in both children and adults and point to new ways of enhancing second language instruction.
As a classifier language, Mandarin requires the obligatory presence of classifiers between numerals and nouns. One prominent property of classifiers is that they must agree with nouns in semantic features such as shape, size, and animacy. When learning classifiers, children must figure out the grammatical position of classifiers as well as semantic features encoded in them and the agreement relation that restricts their combination with nouns. The current study reports an experimental study adopting the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm (IPLP) that examined whether Mandarin-learning 2.5-year-olds are sensitive to the classifier-noun agreement and how they use it in online processing of noun phrases. Thirty-two children were presented with two object pictures of different shapes side by side while listening to classifier-noun combinations across three trial types: classifier-noun match trials (e.g. yi tiao caisede weijin "a CLlong colorful scarf"), classifier-noun mismatch trials (e.g. yi zhang caisede weijin "a CLflat colorful scarf"), and novel noun trials. Children's looking behavior in different trial types was recorded and analyzed. The study yielded two important findings. First, online target-looking was facilitated in match trials but hindered in mismatch trials. Second, looking to classifier-matching objects was instant as soon as classifiers were perceived. This was the case in both familiar noun and novel noun trials. Clearly, children relied on the semantic features encoded in classifiers to predict the upcoming nouns. These findings indicate children's early knowledge of the classifier-noun agreement and their productive deployment of this knowledge in online processing.
A central question in language acquisition is whether individual differences in implicit, domain-general statistical learning (SL) help explain why some adults attain stronger second language (L2) grammar than other individuals. Although SL has been associated with language outcomes, evidence remains limited for Arabic-speaking learners of English in foreign-language contexts and for designs that test whether SL accounts for grammar proficiency beyond general cognitive ability. To address this gap, Saudi university students (native Arabic speakers) learning English as a foreign language completed two implicit SL tasks (auditory - verbal and visual - sequential), an English grammar proficiency test, and a nonverbal intelligence measure (Raven's Progressive Matrices). Performance on both SL tasks demonstrated statistically reliable implicit learning. Importantly, learners with stronger SL aptitude tended to show higher English grammar proficiency, and SL aptitude accounted for substantial variance in grammar outcomes after controlling for nonverbal IQ. This SL - grammar link held across both input modalities, with the Auditory Statistical Learning task showing a slightly stronger correlation with grammar than the Visual Artificial Grammar Learning task. The findings support theoretical accounts that emphasize implicit/procedural learning mechanisms in grammar development and indicate that domain-general pattern-learning ability is a key factor in adult L2 grammar acquisition.
Recent findings challenge the view that phonological abstraction emerges only after perceptual attunement. Four-month-olds can abstract an amodal place of articulation distinction between two artificial languages, well before attunement to native vowels (similar to 7 months) and consonants (similar to 10 months). Here, we followed the original 4-month-old cohort longitudinally, assessing their performance at 7 and 10 months (Experiment 1). Twenty-five Australian English-learning infants were trained to associate cartoon animals with audio-only words from contrasting mini-languages using only labial (e.g. bi-va-wo) versus only coronal consonants (e.g. dae-zu-la). In the test phase, video-only novel words (talking face) were paired with congruent or incongruent animals. Infants looked longer at congruent trials at 4 months, indicating amodal abstraction, but showed no preference at 7 or 10 months. Abstraction scores did not predict receptive or expressive vocabulary at 13 or 25 months. Experiment 2 tested a separate cohort of 10-month-olds to examine potential confounding effects of the longitudinal design in Experiment 1. These infants showed a trend toward incongruency preference, opposite to the 4-month-olds. The effect reached significance when 10-month-olds from Experiment 1 were included in a post hoc analysis. Findings suggest phonological abstraction emerges early but evolves over the first year. Its lack of direct association with later vocabulary suggests abstraction may contribute to language development via intermediate processes.
Regular incidental exposure to a language that someone does not speak can allow a person to build a proto-lexicon of the language - a set of implicitly stored word forms without semantic knowledge. Previous research shows that non-speakers of M & amacr;ori in New Zealand (NZ) have well-developed phonotactic and proto-lexical knowledge of M & amacr;ori. However, we still do not know whether exposure in early childhood is completely necessary for the formation of the proto-lexicon, nor how much proto-lexical knowledge develops from exposure in childhood versus exposure in adulthood. It is also unclear how robust these implicit memories are. To address these gaps, we examine the extent to which childhood exposure and/or ongoing consistent adult exposure are necessary conditions for the creation and/or maintenance of a proto-lexicon by comparing four groups (expats, migrants, local adolescents and local adults). The results reveal that migrants' proto-lexicon is greater than that of local adolescents, indicating that early childhood exposure to the language is not necessary. In addition, expats retained robust memory for their proto-lexical knowledge, acquired before moving overseas. Thus, implicit learning in adulthood plays a significant role and a proto-lexicon can be built and maintained over the course of the entire lifespan.
Differential object marking (DOM) is the overt marking of prominent direct objects. Heritage speakers of Spanish significantly omit the marker "a" with human/animate objects compared to bilingual Spanish-dominant adults and monolingual child and adult Spanish speakers. This study digs deeper into the high omission rates attested in heritage speakers to uncover what may underlie the observed variability. The diachronic evolution of Spanish DOM followed the referentiality scale, which considers the referential prominence of different object DPs (pronoun, name, definite DP, possessive, quantifier, indefinite DP). We hypothesized that such scale may underlie some patterns of variation. Results of two oral production tasks with school-age Spanish-English bilingual children (n = 61), bilingual adults (n = 12), and monolingual Spanish-speaking children (n = 26) and adults (n = 26) found that while the monolingual children and adults and the bilingual adults showed clear DOM variability along the referentiality scale with animate/human objects, the bilingual children attending school in English in the US and L2 children in bilingual schools in general did not. However, those bilingual children attending dual immersion schools showed an emergent pattern of variability attested in monolingually raised children and adults. Our study confirms that quantity and quality of input, including schooling, matters greatly for heritage language development.
This study investigates how structural markedness and school-age L2 exposure shape Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of English consonant clusters (CCs), where L1 transfer interacts with cross-linguistic well-formedness pressures. Seventy-two learners in Grades 2, 4, and 6 completed (a) an auditory identification task involving multiple consonant - letter selections and (b) an immediate repetition task. A 24-item monosyllabic set manipulated cluster position (onset vs. coda), length (two vs. three consonants), and sonority profile (SSP-congruent vs. plateau/violation), and included nonwords to test phonotactic processing with reduced lexical support. Cluster-level accuracy (all consonants correct = 1) was analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression. Native-likeness ratings from blinded, phonetically trained L1 English raters were analyzed with cumulative-link (ordinal) mixed-effects models; effect sizes were reported alongside p-values for the primary models. Overall performance was in the low-to-mid 60s for both identification (66.7%) and production (62.6%), with systematic declines for more marked structures (codas, three-consonant clusters, and SSP plateau/violation profiles). Production errors reflected a constrained repair repertoire: deletion predominated, followed by substitution, with epenthesis comparatively rare - patterns consistent with simplification driven by transfer and articulatory coordination demands. School-age English experience was substantial but uneven, especially outside formal instruction. In multivariable mixed-effects models controlling structural markedness, segmental mismatch, and grade-related schooling, extracurricular school-age exposure showed at most a modest positive association with accuracy, whereas kindergarten experience explained no additional variance once later exposure was modeled. Native-likeness ratings captured perceived quality beyond categorical accuracy and therefore should not be treated as a one-to-one proxy for cluster-level correctness. Pedagogically, the observed difficulty hierarchy suggests prioritizing highly marked clusters (e.g. complex codas and /s/-initial onsets), explicitly addressing prevalent deletion/substitution patterns, and providing sustained practice with non-native segments in cluster contexts.
From early on, young children are sensitive to talker-specific cues derived from voice-related cues. For example, infants recognize words and learn information best from familiar, female adult voices (e.g. maternal caregivers) relative to strangers or children's voices. Considering that age can influence speech processing, we investigated whether toddlers exhibit similar selective attention and learning from voices of different-aged talkers. We recorded visual and auditory stimuli from adult males and females, and boys and girls. In this study, 24 toddlers were taught two novel labels, one by an adult talker and the other by a child talker of the same sex. Results showed that toddlers learned words more effectively from child talkers compared to adult talkers. These findings suggest that toddlers are sensitive to talker age information in speech and show a bias toward learning words from child talkers. We discuss potential origins of such a bias and the implications these findings may have.
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|.
Recent research suggests that caregivers’ speech in response to their infants’ attentional shifts (‘follow-in speech’) is correlated with vocabulary size. It is not yet clear, however, what possible developmental pathways underlie this correlation. One possibility is that follow-in speech, and follow-in naming in particular, predicts infants’ vocabulary because it provides names of objects in infants’ focus. Another possibility is that follow-in speech predicts vocabulary via sustained attention, extending infants’ looking to a specific object of interest and enhancing the encoding of the word-object mapping. We show that despite extending the duration of infants’ attention to objects, the predictive effect of follow-in speech on infants’ is attributable to parents providing the names of objects, regardless of the duration of infants’ attention to the named objects. We also show that the effects of follow-in naming in response to infants’ gaze shifts are distinct from the effects of parents’ responses to other communicative bids, such as vocalizing.
Phrasal prosody is believed to be crucial for syntactic and lexical acquisition, since prosodic boundaries in speech tend to coincide with lexical and syntactic boundaries. However, research on children's ability to exploit prosodic information for parsing reports mixed results, with some providing positive evidence in French while many studies in other languages fail to observe this ability in children up to 6-years-old. To further investigate whether the discrepancies between these studies stem from cross-linguistic or methodological differences, we adapted a recent preferential-looking experiment conducted with French children to a different language: Brazilian Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese-learning 3-to-4-year-olds were presented with either ellipsis (e.g. [The tiger is poking]! [The duck too]!) or transitive sentences (e.g. [The tiger] [is poking the duck too]!), while watching two videos side-by-side, one depicting the transitive interpretation of the sentences, and another depicting the ellipsis interpretation. Results showed that 3-to-4-year-olds successfully exploited prosodic information to distinguish ellipsis from transitive sentences and therefore constrain their parsing. Children in the ellipsis condition looked more at the video depicting the ellipsis interpretation than children in the transitive condition. This result provides cross-linguistic evidence for the role of prosody in constraining parsing in young children.
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.
Infants and adults use statistical information from the speech input to form phonetic categories. This ability has been shown by numerous experiments presenting the participants with either a bimodal or a unimodal distribution of sounds from an acoustic continuum. However, this ability seems to decrease across the first year of life in parallel with infants' establishment of the native language phonetic categories. So far, it is unclear whether this decrease continues beyond infancy, as studies comparing children's and adults' capacities are rare. The present study intended to fill this gap. In three studies, German-learning 12-month-olds were tested using a bimodal distribution, and 4-year-olds and adults were trained with either a bimodal or unimodal distribution of a sound continuum for the non-native Hindi dental-retroflex contrast. Infants were tested using an Alternating/Non-Alternating looking time paradigm, and children and adults were tested in an online AX paradigm. Results revealed an enhancement of the ability to discriminate the contrast only after bimodal training in 4-year-old children and adults but not in 12-month-old infants. Our findings extend previous research by testing infants at 12 months of age, revealing that the effectiveness of unattended distributional learning is reduced by this age. Results from children and adults showed that both age groups were able to discriminate the contrast after exposure to a bimodal distribution and thus the ability for distributional learning is maintained beyond infancy.
