"Language allows us to express and comprehend an unbounded number of thoughts. This fundamental and much-celebrated property is made possible by a division of labor between a large inventory of stored items (e.g., affixes, words, idioms) and a computational system that productively combines these stored units on the fly to create a potentially unlimited array of new expressions. A language lear…
"A Bradford book."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
This comprehensive collection of current research in the development of speech perception and perceptual learning documents the striking changes that take place both in early childhood and throughout life and speculates about the mechanisms responsible for those changes. The findings reported from this rich and active field address the role of growing linguistic knowledge and experience and dem…
"A Bradford book."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to o…
This book brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language--'the language faculty'--raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This boo…
A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition -- often approached as an isolated domain, subject to its own laws and mechanisms -- is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains and well described by associative models. Synthesizing research in d…
This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring express…
"A Bradford Book."The studies in Weaving a Lexicon make a significant contribution to the growing field of lexical acquisition by considering the multidimensional way in which infants and children acquire the lexicon of their native language. They examine the many strands of knowledge and skill--including perceptual sensitivities, conceptual and semantic constraints, and communicative intent--t…