"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…
An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages."All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and …
Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space, time, causalit…
"An original argument to explain the "language gap" between humans and other primates, drawing on research from evolutionary biology, paleobiology, and archaeology"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.