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Nadia Lana; Victor Kuperman – Language Learning and Development, 2024
This study investigates the role of emotional linguistic input in learning novel words with abstract and concrete denotations. It is widely accepted that concrete words are processed more easily than abstract ones. Several theories of vocabulary acquisition additionally propose a critical role of sensorimotor and emotional information during novel…
Descriptors: Incidental Learning, Vocabulary Development, Semantics, Emotional Response
Castroviejo, Elena; Hernández-Conde, José V.; Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Dimitra; Ponciano, Marta; Vicente, Agustín – Language Learning and Development, 2023
This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as "Tigers have stripes" and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as "All tigers have…
Descriptors: Spanish Speaking, Age Groups, Accuracy, Semantics
Yang, Meiling; Wang, Yunqi – Language Learning and Development, 2023
How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…
Descriptors: Correlation, Numeracy, Linguistic Theory, Syntax
Pagliarini, Elena; Lungu, Oana; van Hout, Angeliek; Pintér, Lilla; Surányi, Balázs; Crain, Stephen; Guasti, Maria Teresa – Language Learning and Development, 2022
In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading)…
Descriptors: Contrastive Linguistics, Linguistic Theory, Semantics, Grammar
Pearl, Lisa – Language Learning and Development, 2022
Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Learning Processes, Syntax, Semantics
Pertsova, Katya; Becker, Misha – Language Learning and Development, 2021
This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…
Descriptors: Phonology, Learning Processes, Grammar, Cues
Grinstead, John; Padilla-Reyes, Ramón; Nieves-Rivera, Melissa – Language Learning and Development, 2021
A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as "the" in English, or "los" in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite…
Descriptors: Pragmatics, Vocabulary Development, Form Classes (Languages), Linguistic Theory
Musolino, Julien; Laity d'Agostino, Kelsey; Piantadosi, Steve – Language Learning and Development, 2019
In a recent article published in this journal, Moscati and Crain (M&C) showcase the explanatory power of a learnability constraint called the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al. 1994). If correct, M&C's argument would represent a compelling demonstration of the operation of an innate, domain specific, learning principle. However,…
Descriptors: Semantics, Linguistic Theory, Language Acquisition, Language Research
Hudson Kam, Carla L. – Language Learning and Development, 2018
Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…
Descriptors: Infants, Adult Learning, Grammar, Language Patterns
Suzuki, Takaaki; Kobayashi, Tessei – Language Learning and Development, 2017
Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…
Descriptors: Syntax, Cues, Grammar, Verbs
Semantic Ambiguity and Syntactic Bootstrapping: The Case of Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Sentences
Pozzan, Lucia; Gleitman, Lila R.; Trueswell, John C. – Language Learning and Development, 2016
When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…
Descriptors: Semantics, Syntax, Ambiguity (Semantics), Linguistic Theory
Wellwood, Alexis; Gagliardi, Annie; Lidz, Jeffrey – Language Learning and Development, 2016
Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities ("seven, most") and qualities ("red, spotty") present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding, not only of what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning…
Descriptors: Syntax, Computational Linguistics, Task Analysis, Prediction
Moscati, Vincenzo; Crain, Stephen – Language Learning and Development, 2014
Negative sentences with epistemic modals (e.g., John "might" not come/John "can" not come) contain two logical operators, negation and the modal, which yields a potential semantic ambiguity depending on scope assignment. The two possible readings are in a subset/superset relation, such that the strong reading ("can…
Descriptors: Morphemes, Epistemology, Semantics, Linguistic Theory
Syrett, Kristen; Arunachalam, Sudha; Waxman, Sandra R. – Language Learning and Development, 2014
To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…
Descriptors: Toddlers, Verbs, Semantics, Language Research