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To date, there has been mounting research evidence on the impact of written corrective feedback. In response to this, reviews have been conducted to condense either findings or methodologies through the combined analysis of EFL and ESL studies. Although syntheses shed light on the topic, no one provides exclusive insights into EFL realities. Therefore, this systematic literature review was proposed to synthesize methodologies, findings, and research suggestions of EFL articles analyzing direct and indirect feedback, two widely debated and employed strategies in classrooms, with either a focused or unfocused scope. Through a seven-step protocol suggested by Petticrew and Roberts (2006), 21 EFL primary studies published between 2012 and 2022 were selected from the bibliometric dataset of Crosthwaite et al. (2022), which contains articles retrieved from the Scopus database. The papers were read through to answer five research questions on methodologies, findings, and study suggestions. The results show that most EFL studies were quasi-experimental adopting a quantitative approach with a pretest-posttest-delayed-posttest or pretest-posttest design, and the strategies significantly impinged on grammar and non-grammar aspects. Suggestions are given to further study the impact of feedback under different conditions such as targets, proficiency levels, and strategies and scope with a comparative nature.

This reflective piece tells the story of how I started out doing Conversation Analysis (CA) and have been transitioning into doing mixed methods for some years now. My basic argument is that language learning talk is too complex a phenomenon to analyse using a single methodology. Specifically, it is extremely difficult to isolate from the interaction concrete evidence of the learning of specific individual items in terms of change of cognitive state. This is owing to the singular complexity of language learning, which adds an extra level of complexity to language learning talk, hence supercomplexity. Of course, the counter-argument to this would be that CA as a methodology is designed to reveal the complexity and fluidity of spoken interaction. The complex organisation of ordinary conversation (Sacks et al., 1974) and of varieties of institutional interaction (Drew & Heritage, 1992) have been very well established for a very long time. CA has been extremely successful and popular as a methodology for the analysis of spoken interaction in a huge range of settings. There have been many CA studies of language learning talk over the last few decades, including my own. So why do I now feel that it cannot portray the full complexity of language learning talk on its own? There is an idiosyncratic problem with language learning talk, namely that it has an additional level of complexity superimposed on top of the regular problems of analysing spoken interaction. This is because language is the object as well as the vehicle of language learning talk.

With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to work on language development, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition, a free 5-day virtual school for early career researchers. In this paper, we describe the school, our experience organizing it, and lessons learned. The school had a diverse organizer team, composed of 26 researchers (17 from under represented areas: Subsaharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Central and South America); and a diverse volunteer team, with a total of 95 volunteers from 35 different countries, nearly half from under represented areas. This helped world-wide Page 5 of 5 promotion of the school, leading to 958 registrations from 88 different countries, with 300 registrants (based in 63 countries, 80% from under represented areas) selected to participate in the synchronous aspects of the event. The school employed asynchronous (pre-recorded lectures, which were close-captioned) and synchronous elements (e.g., discussions to place the recorded lectures into participants' context; networking events) across three time zones. A post-school questionnaire revealed that 99% of participants enjoyed taking part in the school. Not with standing these positive quantitative outcomes, qualitative comments suggested we fell short in several areas, including the geographic diversity among lecturers and greater customization of contents to the participants' contexts. Although much remains to be done to promote inclusivity in linguistic research, we hope our school will contribute to empowering researchers to investigate and publish on language acquisition in their home languages, to eventually result in more representative theories and empirical generalizations.

Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST), an instantiation in applied linguistics of complexity epistemology that transcends disciplinary boundaries, has gained much traction and momentum over the last decade, finding expressions in a fast-growing number of empirical second language developmental studies. However, the literature, while rapidly expanding, has displayed much confusion, notably oscillating between invoking CDST as a metatheory and as an object theory. Then, too, the metaphorical genesis of CDST--the metaphorical adoption of complexity epistemology from physical sciences--has seemed to invite miscellaneous interpretations, rendering CDST an ostensibly all-in-one conceptual prism. This article explores the epistemology of CDST, tracing its ontology and examining its role in second language developmental research. This enables a more nuanced understanding of CDST, while at once surfacing critical issues and directions for future research, as it moves toward a pluralistic approach to investigating CDST as a potentially unique lens on second language development.

There is a current 'theory crisis' in language acquisition research, resulting from fragmentation both at the level of the approaches and the linguistic level studied. We identify a need for integrative approaches that go beyond these limitations, and propose to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of current theoretical approaches of language acquisition. In particular, we advocate that language learning simulations, if they integrate realistic input and multiple levels of language, have the potential to contribute significantly to our understanding of language acquisition. We then review recent results obtained through such language learning simulations. Finally, we propose some guidelines for the community to build better simulations.

Based on findings from a variety of research, Shin and Miller (2022) propose a 4-step process that children go through as they learn sociolinguistic variation. Their proposal raises many interesting questions that should inspire future research. Here, I discuss their Step 1 -- the stage in which, according to their proposal, children produce only a single variant, and so appear to be (temporarily) regularizing -- and suggest this may not be the right characterization for all children.

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and Determiners are examples in English of early variability. The limited data in other languages make it impossible to make sweeping claims about early acquisition.

I argue that the variation within and across contexts detailed by Shin & Miller is indicative of a broader phenomenon in which morphosyntax and the discourse context are intertwined, including elements like perspective, discourse relations, information structure, and common ground. Appealing to independent evidence highlighting the role of pragmatics in language acquisition, I suggest that the current research invites us to think more carefully about the integration of pragmatics into a universal language learning process.

In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. This process of early phonetic learning has traditionally been framed as phonetic category acquisition. However, recent studies have hypothesized that the attunement may instead reflect a perceptual space learning process that does not involve categories. In this article, we explore the idea of perceptual space learning by implementing five different perceptual space learning models and testing them on three phonetic contrasts that have been tested in the infant speech perception literature. We reproduce and extend previous results showing that a perceptual space learning model that uses only distributional information about the acoustics of short time slices of speech can account for at least some crosslinguistic differences in infant perception. Moreover, we find that a second perceptual space learning model, which benefits from word-level guidance. performs equally well in capturing crosslinguistic differences in infant speech perception. These results provide support for the general idea of perceptual space learning as a theory of early phonetic learning but suggest that more fine-grained data are needed to distinguish between different formal accounts. Finally, we provide testable empirical predictions of the two most promising models and show that these are not identical, making it possible to independently evaluate each model in experiments with infants in future research.

While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers produced pronouns via a word elicitation task conducted in Trinidadian English Creole and Trinidad and Tobago English. Responses were coded for children's age, gender, district and socioeconomic status; task language; grammatical gender/number; and response form. Conditional inference trees facilitated statistical analysis. When choices were available, children exhibited variable production, with Creole forms often dominant. Grammatical gender influenced whether English or Creole pronouns were selected. Task language influenced possessive pronoun choices, indicating developing sociolinguistic competence. The non-significance of other variables suggests widespread mixing of English and Creole pronouns. Findings underscore the importance of describing understudied populations, especially where variation is inherent, to ensure accurate language assessment.

Studies of language evolution in the lab have used the iterated learning paradigm to show how linguistic structure emerges through cultural transmission--repeated cycles of learning and use across generations of speakers . However, agent-based simulations suggest that prior biases crucially impact the outcome of cultural transmission. Here, we explored this notion through an iterated learning study of English-French bilingual adults (mostly sequential bilinguals dominant in English). Each participant learned two unstructured artificial languages in a counterbalanced fashion, one resembling English, another resembling French at the phono-orthographic level. The output of each participant was passed down to the next participant, forming diffusion chains of 10 generations per language. We hypothesized that artificial languages would become easier to learn and exhibit greater structure when they were aligned with participants' bilingual experience (i.e., English languages being easier to learn overall), or as a function of practice (i.e., languages learned second being easier to learn overall). Instead, we found that English-like languages became more structured over generations, but only when they were learned first. In contrast, French-like languages became more structured regardless of the order of learning, suggesting the presence of an asymmetric switch cost during artificial language learning. Moreover, individual differences in language usage modulated the amount of structure produced by the participants. Overall, these data suggest that bilingual experience impacts how novel languages are learned at an individual level, which can then scale up to cultural transmission of novel language at a group level.

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational techniques. We review the current evidence for the AoA effect stemming from a range of methodologies and paradigms and apply these findings to current explanations of how and where the AoA effect occurs. We conclude that the AoA effect can be found both in the connections between levels of representations and within these representations themselves, and that the effect itself occurs through the process of the distinct coding of early and late items, together with the nature of the connections between levels of representation. This approach strongly suggests that the AoA effect results from the construction of perceptual-semantic representations and the mappings between representations.

Purpose: Drawing on diverse findings in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Language Teaching research, but centering on the unique needs and contexts of international students in post-secondary education, this paper aims to develop a working theory of international students' continued language development. Design/methodology/approach: As a critical review, the paper focuses on the most relevant concepts that have important bearings on the research topic, such as attitude, motivation and willingness to communicate; the age and biological factor, namely, the critical period for SLA; the learning environment and methodological factors, such as the input hypothesis; and finally, the larger sociocultural factor, i.e. Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory of student development. Findings: This paper has developed a comprehensive theory of second language development for international students by synthesizing all relevant research findings in SLA and language teaching research. Research limitations/implications: Linguistic factors, i.e. how students' different first languages impact their pace and difficulty in learning a second language, though important, are not included in this paper. Practical implications: The paper can better inform international students, faculty members, support staff and even members of the larger community about the attributions, the processes and the possible outcomes of second language development for international students. Originality/value: Second language development is an immensely important part of international students' international education journey. But currently, there is no comprehensive and coherent understanding of this issue among stakeholders of international student success.

Studies that measure the effectiveness of language-training program for children's language development do not clearly identify in adult-child interaction which characteristics of educators' language are most effective, particularly for children over 4 years of age who need to develop complex syntactic skills. Our study aimed to analyze the language use of 26 educators (with different professions: teachers, animators, and employees) participating in French language-training program for preschoolers. This training was based on linguistic research on language acquisition and focused on syntax. A total of 131 children were recorded in adult-child joint narration in a dyadic interaction across six French cities and 20 preschools. The statistical analysis of the linguistic and pragmatic properties of the educators' language while interacting with children demonstrated that the educators changed their language practices after training. This study also revealed that syntax complexity of educators' input has a significant impact on syntax development of children.

How people conceptualize learning is related to real-world educational consequences across many domains of education. Despite its centrality to the educational system, we know little about how the public reasons about language acquisition, and the potential consequences for their thinking about real-world issues (e.g., policy endorsements). The current studies examined people's essentialist beliefs about language acquisition (e.g., that language is innate and biologically based), then investigated how individual differences in these beliefs related to the endorsement of educational myths and policies. We probed several dimensions of essentialist beliefs, including that language acquisition is innate, genetically based, and wired in the brain. In two studies, we tested specific hypotheses regarding the extent to which people use essentialist thinking when reasoning about: learning a specific language (e.g., Korean), learning a first language more generally, and learning two or more languages. Across studies, participants were more likely to essentialize the ability to learn multiple languages than one's first language, and more likely to essentialize the learning of multiple languages and one's first language than the learning of a particular language. We also found substantial individual differences in the degree to which participants essentialized language acquisition. In both studies, these individual differences correlated with an endorsement of language-related educational neuromyths (Study 1 and pre-registered Study 2), and rejection of educational policies that promote multilingual education (Study 2). Together, these studies reveal the complexity of how people reason about language acquisition and its corresponding educational consequences.

Language is subject to a variety of pressures. Recent work has documented that many aspects of language structure have properties that appear to be shaped by biases for the efficient communication of semantic meaning. Other work has investigated the role of social pressures, whereby linguistic variants can acquire positive or negative evaluation based on who is perceived to be using them. While the influence of these two sets of biases on language change has been well documented, they have typically been treated separately, in distinct lines of research. We used a miniature language paradigm to test how these biases interact in language change. Specifically, we asked whether pressures to mark social meaning can lead linguistic systems to become less efficient at communicating semantic meaning. We exposed participants to a miniature language with uninformative constituent order and two dialects, one that employed case and one that did not. In the instructions, we socially biased participants toward users of the case dialect, users of the no-case dialect, or neither. Learners biased toward the no-case dialect dropped informative case, thus creating a linguistic system with high message uncertainty. They failed to compensate for this increased message uncertainty even after additional exposure to the novel language. Case was retained in all other conditions. These findings suggest that social biases not only interact with biases for efficient communication in language change but also can lead to linguistic systems that are less efficient at communicating semantic meaning.

The most recent studies on the acquisition of evidentiality, be it morphologically or syntactically encoded, have argued that the comprehension lag detected is due to factors having to do with others' authority or mental perspective, where "others" stands for other individuals involved in the experiment in various manners (e.g., the experimenter or someone in the props). However, these studies have yet to detect the age at which children eventually align with adults in comprehending the grammatical structure encoding the evidential interpretation when it is syntactically encoded. The comprehension study reported in this article has taken the aforementioned factors into consideration and has involved a large number of Greek-speaking children between second and fifth grades, along with an adult control group, to investigate syntactically encoded evidentiality. The results suggest that children align with adults in mapping source of evidence to sentence type during fourth grade, when they are 9 years old or older, suggesting that there should be additional factors behind the delayed comprehension of evidentiality. It is argued that these factors are mainly grammatical, and, most importantly, they arise to a larger extent in languages that encode evidentiality in the syntax

Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning focuses primarily on bimodal bilinguals, mostly hearing adults learning their first sign language (M2L2 learners). However, other groups of L2 signers exist, including deaf learners who have previously acquired a sign language and are learning a new one (M1L2 learners). M1L2 acquisition offers unique insights into complex interactions including multilingualism, modality, and timing of acquisition. We argue that M1L2 signers are a key comparison group for investigations of various L2 and so-called modality effects and also represent a crucial test case for re-examining the traditional constructs of "native speaker/signer" and the effects of initial language delay or deprivation on subsequent language acquisition.

On June 12, 2018, Dr. Hansun Zhang Waring's Language Socialization class at Teachers College, Columbia University had the great pleasure and honor of being joined by Dr. Bambi Schieffelin, Collegiate Professor at New York University. A co-founder (with Elinor Ochs) of the field of language socialization, Dr. Schieffelin has done extensive research on linguistic anthropology, language ideology, literacy, missionization, and much, much more. She is the author of the ethnography "The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children," co-author of the classic chapter "Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications," and co-author of the "Handbook of Language Socialization"--a foundational reference work for all language socialization scholars. In this interview, she shares her path to Language Socialization (LS), experiences from her groundbreaking LS work in Papua New Guinea, affordances, obstacles, and recent developments in LS research, and key takeaways for LS researchers.

A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world's 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: "Journal of Child Language," "First Language," "Language Acquisition" and "Language Learning and Development." We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal's inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world's languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.

Increased second language acquisition (SLA) research interest in the effect of planning on subsequent L2 oral production has typically examined the effect of planning on the syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and/or fluency (CALF) of L2 production. However, the results of research in this domain are inconclusive. This study, a research synthesis and meta-analysis of SLA research on the effects of planning on the CALF of L2 oral production, attempts to facilitate a direct comparison of such research, first by examining the role of planning in theoretical models of (i) speech production, (ii) task complexity, and (iii) task readiness; second by summarizing the features of SLA research on planning; and finally by comparing the results of quantitative research on the effect of planning on subsequent L2 production. The results of the research synthesis portion of the study suggest a number of consistencies in SLA research on planning to date, whereas the results of the meta-analysis portion of the study suggest clear effects of planning on L2 oral production and have clear pedagogical implications for L2 instruction.

Investigations of crosslinguistic effects in second language acquisition (SLA) have contributed rich understandings about the ways in which prior language knowledge and experience can influence additional language learning. Building on this work, one recent line of research has examined the extent to which SLA findings about crosslinguistic influence can be used to improve L2 learning, indicating that explicit instruction tailored to address the nature of the crosslinguistic learning problem can benefit L2 performance. At the same time, however, this line of inquiry is relatively novel and under-researched. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to suggest further research which might advance knowledge and understanding about the ways in which explicit instruction can facilitate second language (L2) learning of crosslinguistically difficult target features. To this end, I lay the ground for a series of close replications designed to understand the role of prior language knowledge and experience in L2 learning: Ellis and Sagarra (2011) and Tolentino and Tokowicz (2014). These studies were selected because they are grounded in empirical SLA research and SLA theory. In addition, the selected studies facilitate replication because they have either (i) made their data collection materials available in digital repositories or (ii) have robustly described their design and provided the stimuli used.

A quarter of a century has passed since complex dynamic systems theory was proposed as an alternative paradigm to rethink and reexamine some of the main questions and phenomena in applied linguistics and language learning. In this article, we report a scoping review of the heterogenous body of research adopting this framework. We analyzed 158 reports satisfying our inclusion criteria (89 journal articles and 69 dissertations) for methodological characteristics and substantive contributions. We first highlight methodological trends in the report pool using a framework for dynamic method integration at the levels of study aim, unit of analysis, and choice of method. We then survey the main substantive contribution this body of research has made to the field. Finally, examination of study quality in these reports revealed a number of potential areas of improvement. We synthesize these insights in what we call the "nine tenets" of complex dynamic systems theory research, which we hope will help enhance the methodological rigor and the substantive contribution of future research.

This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to trace changes in one learner's repair practices during a repetitive storytelling activity in an intermediate-level ESL classroom. An analysis of the learner's phonological and grammatical repairs is guided by two questions: How are the repair sequences organized, and what changes occur in the sequences over time? By considering the impact of task repetition on a student's linguistic performance, this study highlights CA's analytical potential for examining learning processes during classroom activities on a highly detailed level. The findings contribute to the larger sociocultural reconceptualization of second language acquisition by demonstrating how learning occurs and is made visible during a student's interaction with her teacher and peers.

The aim of the paper is to present the results of a research project called 'Tell Me', conducted from October 2018 to March 2020. The project focused on Bengali children living in Venice, Italy, and aimed to describe (1) children's languages in the home environment and at school; (2) the quality and quantity of input they receive in every language (both at school and at home); and (3) how the family language policy and the Italian language institution policy at schools may influence and impact their language development. The project studied seven children with migration background between the ages of four and six. All these children are suspected of having a communication disorder or a language acquisition disability, since they do not speak Italian fluently as a second language at school or Bengali as their first language at home. According to neuropsychiatrists' hypothesis, results will show that children are just not exposed sufficiently to quality L1, L2, or L3 input (at home and in different social contexts) and that in many cases these children are learning English as their main language, as it is considered as a status symbol, as well as a resource able to improve their lives.

Two distinctive types of complex predicates found in English are separable verb-particle combinations ("particles") and adjectival resultatives ("ARs"). Snyder ties both to the positive setting of the Compounding Parameter ("TCP"). This predicts that during the acquisition of a [+TCP] language, any child who has acquired ARs or particles will also permit "creative" bare-stem, endocentric compounding. Existing support comes from children acquiring Japanese and English. Yet the same evidence introduces two new puzzles: (i) why is compounding acquired roughly a year earlier in English than in Japanese?; and (ii) in English, why is compounding always acquired at the same time as (and never substantially prior to) particles? Here, we argue that both puzzles can be explained if we allow the trigger for a single parameter-setting (e.g., [+TCP]) to be completely different for children acquiring different languages. Specifically, the trigger for [+TCP] (and hence, ARs) in English is proposed to be particles, which are unavailable in Japanese. Two novel predictions are tested and supported: (i) the frequency will be higher for particles than for any (other) potential trigger in child-directed English or Japanese; and (ii) children acquiring English (unlike Japanese) will have reliably adult-like comprehension of ARs by the age of 3 years.

Research in language development has only recently begun to focus on the inherent variability of language. Previous studies have explored at what age children begin to produce variable linguistic forms and how these forms progress through development. While children produce adult-like variation early on, some variable forms take longer to acquire than others do. The current study builds on this previous research using naturalistic corpus data to compare variable differential object marking in the speech of Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers. While previous studies of adult speech have highlighted the variable use of the accusative object marker "a," the variable distribution of the "a"-marker has been largely overlooked in studies of child Spanish. Our results show that preschool-age children use the same linguistic constraints as their caregivers when producing direct objects. We also found that younger children show different patterns of "a"-marking compared to older children and caregivers. These patterns suggest that the developmental trajectory of individual linguistic constraints depends on the distribution of variable contexts in the child's input. Our findings highlight the importance of examining caregivers' use of variable forms alongside children's productions in language acquisition research.

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 traditionally where the tears have come in. I discuss poverty of the stimulus from the perspective of language development, highlighting how poverty of the stimulus relates to expectations about learning and the data available to learn from. I describe common interpretations of what poverty of the stimulus means when it occurs, and approaches for determining when poverty of the stimulus is in fact occurring. I close with illustrative examples of poverty of the stimulus in the domains of syntax, lexical semantics, and phonology, and discuss the value of identifying instances of poverty of the stimulus when it comes to understanding language development.

Iterated language learning experiments that explore the emergence of linguistic structure in the laboratory vary considerably in methodological implementation, limiting the generalizability of findings. Most studies also restrict themselves to exploring the emergence of combinatorial and compositional structure in isolation. Here, we use a novel signal space comprising binary auditory and visual sequences and manipulate the amount of learning and temporal stability of these signals. Participants had to learn signals for meanings differing in size, shape, and brightness; their productions in the test phase were transmitted to the next participant. Across transmission chains of 10 generations each, Experiment 1 varied how much learning of auditory signals took place, and Experiment 2 varied temporal stability of visual signals. We found that combinatorial structure emerged only for auditory signals, and iconicity emerged when the amount of learning was reduced, as an opportunity for rote-memorization hampers the exploration of the iconic affordances of the signal space. In addition, compositionality followed an inverted u-shaped trajectory raising across several generations before declining again toward the end of the transmission chains. This suggests that detection of systematic form-meaning linkages requires stable combinatorial units that can guide learners toward the structural properties of signals, but these combinatorial units had not yet emerged in these unfamiliar systems. Our findings underscore the importance of systematically manipulating training conditions and signal characteristics in iterated language learning experiments to study the interactions between the emergence of iconicity, combinatorial and compositional structure in novel signaling systems.

Children's differing learning trajectories cross-linguistically have been at the forefront of gender acquisition research, often with conflicting results and conclusions. As a result, the source of children's different learning behaviors in gender acquisition has been unclear. I argue that children's gender acquisition is driven by the search for productive patterns. First, I provide corpus studies where the predictions of a learning model (Yang, 2016) are formulated. Second, I report the results of an elicited production task on Icelandic-speaking children (N = 26, ages 2;6-6;3 years) and adults (N = 18) that puts these predictions to test. The results suggest that Icelandic-speaking children and adults draw a categorical distinction between productive and unproductive suffixes in Icelandic gender assignment. I discuss the implications of these findings for morphological learning beyond gender acquisition.

Immersion programs have long been considered the gold standard for school-based language revitalization, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the quantity and quality of the input that they provide to young language learners. Drawing on new data from three such programs (Kaqchikel, Western Subanon, and Maori), each with its own particular motivation, objectives, and pedagogical practices, we examine a key component of this revitalization strategy, namely the amount and type of lexical input that children receive. Our findings include previously unknown facts about the number of words that children in these programs hear per hour, the ratio of word tokens to word types, and the skewed frequency distribution of the particular words that make up the input. We discuss our findings with reference both to comparable measures for first language acquisition in a home setting and to their relevance for pedagogical strategies in the classroom.

Evidence for the role of procedural memory in second language (L2) acquisition has emerged in our field. However, little is known about the reliability and validity of the procedural memory measures used in this research. The present study (N = 119) examined the reliability and the convergent and discriminant validity of three assessments that have previously been used to examine procedural memory learning ability in L2 acquisition, the dual-task Weather Prediction Task (DT-WPT), the Alternating Serial Reaction Time Task (ASRT), and the Tower of London (TOL). Measures of declarative memory learning ability were also collected. For reliability, the DT-WPT and TOL tasks met acceptable standards. For validity, an exploratory factor analysis did not provide evidence for convergent validity, but the ASRT and the TOL showed reasonable discriminant validity with declarative memory measures. We argue that the ASRT may provide the purest engagement of procedural memory learning ability, although more reliable dependent measures for this task should be considered. The Serial Reaction Time task also appears promising, although we recommend further consideration of this task as the present analyses were post hoc and based on a smaller sample. We discuss these results regarding the assessment of procedural memory learning ability as well as implications for implicit language aptitude.

Purpose: A systematic review was performed to determine the extent to which orthographic facilitation, a strategy to improve word learning, has been demonstrated in the literature for children and adolescents from clinical categories such as developmental language disorders (DLD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Down syndrome, dyslexia, hearing impairment, intellectual disability, and cerebral palsy. Method: Five databases were searched for all studies published through December 2019. Eligible studies included participants from a clinical population (DLD, ASD, dyslexia, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, hearing impairment, etc.) and compared word learning with and without orthography. Selected studies were extracted for pertinent information. In addition, assessment of the methodological rigor was performed for each study. Results: The review yielded five studies that targeted word learning with orthographic facilitation for children from various clinical populations including DLD, verbal children with autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia. All studied populations showed a benefit for word learning in picture naming posttests when words were trained in the presence of orthography. Conclusions: For the studied populations, training words in the presence of orthography will improve word learning accuracy and retention. The review highlights the need for more research in this area across other clinical populations.

This paper provides the first evidence of maternal speech--motherese--in Wichi, an indigenous language with a complex morphology spoken in the Gran Chaco region of Argentina. The corpus consists of 22 hours of video recordings from the daily life of three children, starting from their one-morpheme utterance period (MLU = 1) to the onset of combining early morphemes (MLU = 2.30). Employing a mixed methodological approach, results allowed us: (a) to create an observational system of specific categories for the analysis of the maternal speech in Wichi; (b) to identify motherese in Wichi, noticeably stable across cases and organized into constellations of lexical, pragmatic-discursive and prosodic features with changes and continuities during the developmental target period. The results are discussed cross-culturally in the light of a renewed cultural approach, while limitations and future directions are addressed. [Translation from Spanish by Jennifer Martin.]

This study's objective is to analyse repair sequences for referring problems that occur in conversation with young children (two to three years old), which have shown how reference recognition unfolds along a collaborative process. The results reveal that caretakers frame varying repair questions and that the children locally answer the caretakers' questions, tending to display specific responses for specific repair frames: they either repeat their previous expression or utilize diverse, more informative expressions. Jointly considered, the contributions from children and caretakers display an informational equilibrium characteristic of parallel sequences in adult interactions. The repair sequences clearly attest to the children's attention to the conversational exchange, the gradual reference optimization in their successive contributions and the delay in conversational progressivity with regard to the primary goal of achieving reference recognition. [Translation from Spanish by Jennifer Martin.]

Emerging audio technologies over the last decade have provided a new, unprecedented window into the everyday lives of infants and young children. These new approaches will allow us to begin to address longstanding questions about the nature of language experiences across languages, communities and situations and the role of these experiences in language development across contexts. Here, I discuss the primary technology, LENA®, as well as more recent technological developments, and some of the recent findings in this domain. I also describe recent efforts to leverage these capabilities towards a much broader vision of exploring diverse child language experiences using largescale collaborative efforts. [Translation from English by Mercè Rius.]

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the maturity of still-dependent functions in children. But this conception of the ZPD conflates two very different kinds of level: that of the child and that of the child's social milieu. We propose instead an analysis of child speech using Halliday's work on child development and his systemic-functional linguistics. We measure the emergence of modality, abstraction, and explicit clause Theme in Korean. We analyze four conversations with a single child over three years--from age four to seven. We find that there is a strong shift in the proportion of her clauses devoted to modal probability and towards explicit, textual themes. Counterintuitively, however, the nominal groups in her vocabulary become more concrete rather than more abstract. We conclude that Vygotsky's ZPD can be accurately gauged and traced through speech development, but for that very reason it cannot be reliably explained by either the child or the environment.

In English, the sentence "Mary didn't eat pizza or sushi" is assigned the "neither interpretation" (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction has been attributed to the Disjunction Parameter. On one value of this lexical parameter, disjunction is a Positive Polarity Item (+PPI). On the other value, disjunction is not a Positive Polarity Item (-PPI). According to the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP), all child language learners are predicted to initially assign the neither interpretation to negative disjunctive sentences, for reasons of language learnability. The present study investigates the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction in Catalan. The findings confirm that disjunction is +PPI for adults; children show a bimodal distribution. For some children, disjunction is -PPI, as predicted by the SSP. However, some children adopt the adult +PPI value of the Disjunction Parameter. Children's level of linguistic maturity, as measured by a sentence repetition task, was correlated with their judgments about negative sentences with disjunction such that children with lower scores tended to adopt the -PPI value. To explain the relatively early parameter resetting by some Catalan-speaking children, as compared to children acquiring other languages where disjunction is +PPI, we discuss the possible "blocking effect" of an alternative lexical expression in Catalan, which unambiguously conveys the neither interpretation.

A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones of development (ZPD). Instead of interpreting the ZPD as learning (scaffolding, self-regulation or metacognition), we propose a strictly developmental view, based on Vygotsky's late and as yet untranslated pedological lectures. Because the lectures are unfinished, there are three apparent contradictions in his system of zones. Using the child language studies of the late Michael Halliday, we propose some possible solutions. In conclusion, we propose three alterations of the grandmotherly teachings that might orient the child towards the next, or proximal, zone of her development.

Does language have a role to play in conceptual development, and if so, what is that role? Understanding the contents of another person's mind parallels the development in early childhood of mental state language. Does the conceptual understanding get reflected in and drive the language development, or does the language allow the representation of propositional attitudes like belief? The paper reviews the evidence and sets up the terms of the debate, focusing on the syntax for mental states. It also asks whether syntax development could serve as a scaffold for other concepts that are described by propositions rather than labels. Finally, it reviews experimentation on the syntax of embedded clauses, where subtle phenomena are acquired for which it is impossible to imagine nonverbal counterparts: here, language is human thinking.

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical level is not reducible to their lexical or pragmatic abilities. Moreover, the children's capacity for generalization at the lexical semantic level is more impaired than their grammatical abstractions. These findings cannot be accounted for by Ambridge's model of stored exemplars and domain-general analogizing. [For Ben Ambridge's "Against Stored Abstractions: A Radical Exemplar Model of Language Acquisition," see EJ1269951.]

This article combines research results centred on theory of mind (ToM) from cognitive and developmental psychology (Goldman 2006; Apperly 2010; Wilkinson and Ball 2012) with the notion of intersubjectivity in usage-based linguistics (i.a. Verhagen 2005; Nuyts 2012; Traugott 2012). It identifies some of the controversies in the literature from both domains and suggests the desiderata for a hybrid approach to intersubjectivity, which is distinctively designed to tackle applied research in social and cognitive sciences. This model is based on a mismatch between interaction as mere 'co-action' vs. interaction as spontaneously communicated awareness of an(other) mind(s). It provides a case study centred on the first language acquisition of pre-nominal usage of "this/that" and "such." From, respectively, a distinctive collexeme (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004) and behavioural profile analysis (Gries 2010) will emerge that beyond expressions of joint attention, children's ToM ability progressively underpins 'ad-hoc' generalized instantiations based on extended intersubjectivity, viz. the socio-cognitive skill to problematize what a general persona would act, feel, or think in a specific context.

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations with 62 speakers. Comparing normative forms to observed forms in logistic regression analyses showed that the form of the nominal and the case selector have significant effects on the rate of match between normative and observed forms, while declension does not. Most mismatches in the heritage data were replaced by the nominative, a pattern which is also occasionally found in homeland speech. The second most frequent pattern is genitive-accusative mismatch in specific contexts, in both heritage and homeland speech. Importantly, no significant differences between homeland and heritage speakers emerged, with 8% mismatch attested in the heritage and 2% in homeland data.