Children's acquisition of word order variation: A study of subject placement in embedded clauses in Norwegian

Norwegian embedded clauses give children two options for subject placement: preceding or following negation (S-Neg/Neg-S). In the adult language, S-Neg is the 'default' and highly frequent option, and Neg-S is infrequent in children's input. However, Neg-S may be argued to be the structurally less complex. We investigate whether children are aware of the existence of both subject positions, and if they prefer the more frequent or the less complex position. Through an elicited production task with monolingual Norwegian children (N=33, age 3;1-6;1) we find that children in general overuse the Neg-S option, and we suggest that children have an inherent preference for the less complex position, due to a principle of structural economy. We also find that a group of children display U-shaped development, first using only S-Neg, then only Neg-S and finally S-Neg again, and we relate this to structure building and economy of movement.

The coarticulation-duration relationship in early Quechua speech

Evidence from acoustic and articulatory phonetics suggests that children coarticulate more than adults, but previous work has focused on the instantiation of coarticulation with phonology in a typologically homogeneous sample. The interplay of coarticulation with children's speaking rate has also been ignored. How do coarticulation and speaking rate (duration) interact over the course of development, and does the interaction manifest differently across distinct morphological environments? To answer this, the current study measured the speech patterns of bilingual Quechua-Spanish children (5-10 years) and adults. Coarticulation and duration were measured in two word environments, within morphemes and across morpheme boundaries. Unsurprisingly, adults consistently coarticulated more in shorter duration sequences, in both morphological environments. The children's coarticulation-duration patterns, however, varied by morphological environment. Additionally, the children's speech patterns, but not the adults', were sensitive to prosodic length: children produced increasingly shorter phones in words with more syllables. It is suggested that the differences between adults and children are attributable to adults' faster speaking rate and increased dominance in Quechua.

On the Acquisition of the Arabic Grammatical Gender by Arabic-Speaking Children with ASD

This study examines the ability of Arabic-speaking-children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to acquire the Arabic grammatical gender. It also explores whether the use of visual stimuli can be effective to acquire it. Using the experimental design of a pre- and post-test, 14 children with ASD were tested twice on the same items after a treatment period and their results were compared using a paired sample t-test. The results showed that the use of visual stimuli could be effective in the acquisition of grammatical gender evidenced by the higher accuracy rate on the post-test. The results also demonstrated that the visibility of the feminine suffix marked on the target noun and the participants' familiarity with these nouns contributed to this rate on the post-test. Furthermore, it was shown that even if the noun belonged to a natural gender class, it had no effect on the participants' answers unlike the results reported by previous studies on the acquisition of grammatical gender.

WordSeg: Standardizing unsupervised word form segmentation from text

A basic task in first language acquisition likely involves discovering the boundaries between words or morphemes in input where these basic units are not overtly segmented. A number of unsupervised learning algorithms have been proposed in the last 20 years for these purposes, some of which have been implemented computationally, but whose results remain difficult to compare across papers. We created a tool that is open source, enables reproducible results, and encourages cumulative science in this domain. WordSeg has a modular architecture: It combines a set of corpora description routines, multiple algorithms varying in complexity and cognitive assumptions (including several that were not publicly available, or insufficiently documented), and a rich evaluation package. In the paper, we illustrate the use of this package by analyzing a corpus of child-directed speech in various ways, which further allows us to make recommendations for experimental design of follow-up work. Supplementary materials allow readers to reproduce every result in this paper, and detailed online instructions further enable them to go beyond what we have done. Moreover, the system can be installed within container software that ensures a stable and reliable environment. Finally, by virtue of its modular architecture and transparency, WordSeg can work as an open-source platform, to which other researchers can add their own segmentation algorithms.

Cluster production in speech of Persian-speaking cochlear implanted children

OBJECTIVE

This study is to examine the final cluster processing in Cochlear implanted child and compare the hearing age factor with the chronological age one.

INTRODUCTION

Scholars argue that, in a Cochlear Implanted (CI) child, the hearing age is the crucial factor in the speech rather than the chronological age. To determine which factor affects the production more, we examined the mastery of Persian final consonant clusters realization in CI children at one-to-two years of hearing experience and compared the result to Normal Hearing (NH) peers.

METHODS AND MATERIALS

The study included 21 children in two categories of girls and boys. Using picture-naming task, we collected the data from participants.

RESULT

Data analysis showed that all the children used the same set of phonological rules at their developmental stages of word final consonant cluster but the distribution of preferences differed between the groups. In one hand, Cluster reduction was the most produced phonological rule in both groups and on the other hand, CI children preferred breathing, coalescence and cluster simplification more than NH children did. Considering Gender, unlike NH girls and boys who had the same trend in their phonological system, CI girls were closer to complete production rather than boys.

CONCLUSION

According to this survey, what seems to be important in speech production of CI children is years of hearing experience rather than chronological age. Girls tried different rules compared to boys for cluster production, but when the mastery over cluster production was achieved, there was no difference between girls and boys.

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., Bybee & Moder, ) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, ) posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal "add -ed" rule that does not require analogy across regular past-tense forms. Children (aged 3-4; 5-6; 6-7; 9-10) saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake). Past-tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal "did yesterday." Collapsing across age group (since no interaction was observed), the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past-tense form (e.g., gezzed; chaked) was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single-route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past-tense is best explained by a single-route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules.

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). In two between-participant groups, children either just heard or heard and repeated WANT-to, WANT-X, and control prime sentences after which to-infinitival constructions were elicited. We found that both age groups were primed, but in different ways. In the 2;6-3;0 year olds, WANT-to primes facilitated the provision of to in target utterances relative to the control contexts, but no significant effect was found for WANT-X primes. In the 3;6-4;0 year olds, both WANT-to and WANT-X primes showed a priming effect, namely WANT-to primes facilitated and WANT-X primes inhibited provision of to. We argue that these effects reflect developmental differences in the level of proficiency in and preference for the two constructions, and they are broadly consistent with "priming as implicit learning" accounts. The current study shows that (a) children as young as 2;6-3;0 years of age can be primed when they have only heard (not repeated) particular constructions, (b) children are acquiring at least two constructions for the matrix verb WANT, and (c) that these two WANT-constructions compete for production.

Measuring Metasyntactic Abilities: On a Classification of Metasyntactic Tasks

Researchers working on metasyntactic abilities (i.e., the metalinguistic ability associated with syntax) face the problem of defining and measuring them. Metasyntactic abilities is a multifaceted concept, which encompasses various types of behaviours, from being able to intentionally manipulate syntactic structures to being able to state syntactic rules, and the way in which it is defined and measured varies greatly from one study to another. The present paper proposes a theoretically informed classification of syntax related tasks. The first part presents previous research defining and distinguishing various types of syntactic and metasyntactic abilities and their interrelations. In the second part, commonly used tasks are described and analyzed in terms of the framework presented, with the aim of better pinpointing the type of ability measured by each task. Ultimately, with this analysis of commonly used tasks, we hope to offer criteria for discriminating between the various measures of metasyntactic abilities.

Thinking About Multiword Constructions: Usage-Based Approaches to Acquisition and Processing

Usage-based approaches to language hold that we learn multiword expressions as patterns of language from language usage, and that knowledge of these patterns underlies fluent language processing. This paper explores these claims by focusing upon verb-argument constructions (VACs) such as "V(erb) about n(oun phrase)." These are productive constructions that bind syntax, lexis, and semantics. It presents (a) analyses of usage patterns of English VACs in terms of their grammatical form, semantics, lexical constituency, and distribution patterns in large corpora; (b) patterns of VAC usage in child-directed speech and child language acquisition; and (c) investigations of VAC free-association and psycholinguistic studies of online processing. We conclude that VACs are highly patterned in usage, that this patterning drives language acquisition, and that language processing is sensitive to the forms of the syntagmatic construction and their distributional statistics, the contingency of their association with meaning, and spreading activation and prototypicality effects in semantic reference. Language users have rich implicit knowledge of the statistics of multiword sequences.

The pace of vocabulary growth during preschool predicts cortical structure at school age

Children vary greatly in their vocabulary development during preschool years. Importantly, the pace of this early vocabulary growth predicts vocabulary size at school entrance. Despite its importance for later academic success, not much is known about the relation between individual differences in early vocabulary development and later brain structure and function. Here we examined the association between vocabulary growth in children, as estimated from longitudinal measurements from 14 to 58 months, and individual differences in brain structure measured in 3rd and 4th grade (8-10 years old). Our results show that the pace of vocabulary growth uniquely predicts cortical thickness in the left supramarginal gyrus. Probabilistic tractography revealed that this region is directly connected to the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis) and the ventral premotor cortex, via what is most probably the superior longitudinal fasciculus III. Our findings demonstrate, for the first time, the relation between the pace of vocabulary learning in children and a specific change in the structure of the cerebral cortex, specifically, cortical thickness in the left supramarginal gyrus. They also highlight the fact that differences in the pace of vocabulary growth are associated with the dorsal language stream, which is thought to support speech perception and articulation.