Edited by Inbal Arnon, Marisa Casillas, Chigusa Kurumada and Bruno Estigarribia
Understanding how communicative goals impact and drive the learning process has been a long-standing issue in the field of language acquisition. Recent years have seen renewed interest in the social and pragmatic aspects of language learning: the way interaction shapes what and how children learn.… read more
Are all children exposed to the same linguistic input, and do they follow the same route in acquisition? The answer is no: The language that children hear differs even within a social class or cultural setting, as do the paths individual children take. The linguistic signal itself is also variable,… read more
One striking commonality between languages is their Zipfian distributions: A power-law distribution of word frequency. This distribution is found across languages, speech genres, and within different parts of speech. The recurrence of such distributions is thought to reflect cognitive and/or… read more
The chapter explores the distribution and content of frequent frames – recurring multiword sequences – appearing at the start of utterances in speech directed to young Hebrew-speaking children. Previous work has documented the existence and prevalence of such frames in several languages (English,… read more
There is growing evidence that multiword information affects processing. In this paper, we look at the effect of word and multiword frequency on the phonetic duration of words in spontaneous speech to (a) extend previous findings and (b) ask whether the relation between word and multiword… read more
Textbook descriptions of how production develops in first language acquisition often move from babbling (producing syllables), through single-word utterances, to multi-word combinations. This progression emphasizes the small-to-big aspect of language learning where each stage involves larger, more… read more
In this chapter, I outline the developmental path of relative clauses in Hebrew while asking more general questions about how constructions are learned. I argue that Hebrew-speaking children show a gradual expansion of uses that is sensitive to the distributional patterns in their input. This… read more
