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Because information theory equates information with event occurrence probabilities, when applying its methods, language researchers typically take the information provided by words to be their relative frequencies in a corpus. This implicitly assumes words occur uniformly across contexts, however empirically, word distributions are bursty: the likelihood of most words appearing in most contexts is small, whereas the likelihood of a word recurring in context is much higher. In an elicitation study we examined whether speakers are sensitive to the dynamic word occurrence probabilities this implies. Consistent with proposals that prenominal adjectives increase noun predictability, participants produced numerous seemingly redundant adjectives prior to unambiguous nouns at first mention. However, despite receiving no feedback, they produced significantly fewer adjectives before subsequent mentions of the same nouns, indicating they had re-evaluated their probabilities. These results support the idea that prenominal adjectives facilitate efficient communication, and that speakers' representations of lexical probabilities are dynamic.

This systematic review reports on research investigating the impact of multi-word unit (MWU) input on young learners' second language (L2) attainment in instructed settings. Recent findings suggest that L2 learners can generalise from MWU input, abstract patterns and employ such schemata productively via slot-filling, indicating that MWUs are key catalysts of learners' L2 development. Simultaneously, primary school L2 instruction is on the rise worldwide and the importance of MWUs is acknowledged in curricula, teacher education and teaching materials. Therefore, the incentive of this review is to systematically report the state of the art of research regarding the impact of MWU instruction in early L2 teaching contexts. The review covers English, German and French research into typically developing monolingual children aged 5-12 learning an L2 in instructed teaching settings. Only two of the total results (n = 2233) met the inclusion criteria. Following quality assessment using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool and based on a narrative synthesis of available results, we cannot report trustworthy evidence of the effectiveness of teaching MWUs to young L2 learners. We highlight the lack of research evidence and conclude that existing research lacks robust evidence that MWU input already established in teaching contexts has a measurable effect on specific aspects of students' L2 attainment, such as productive skills. Although we promote MWU's potentially facilitating role in L2 development, we call for more classroom-based intervention research on MWUs in primary school contexts to enable much-needed evidence-based recommendations for L2 teaching to support L2 learning outcomes in primary schools.

Most common words in English have multiple different meanings, but relatively little is known about why children grasp some meanings better than others. This study aimed to examine how variables at the child-level, wordform-level, and meaning-level impact knowledge of words with multiple meanings. In this study, 174 children aged 5- to 9-years-old completed a test of homonym knowledge, and measures of non-verbal intelligence and language background were collected. Psycholinguistic features of the wordforms tested were assessed through collecting adult ratings, corpus coding, and using existing databases. Logistic mixed effects models revealed that whilst the frequency of wordforms contributed to children's knowledge, so also did dominance and imageability of the separate meanings of the word. Predictors were similar for children with English as an Additional Language and English as a first language. This greater understanding of why some word meanings are known better than others has significant implications for vocabulary learning.

A key question in developmental research concerns how children learn associations between words and meanings in their early language development. Given a vast array of possible referents, how does the child know what a word refers to? We contend that onomatopoeia (e.g. "knock," "meow"), where a word's sound evokes the sound properties associated with its meaning, are particularly useful in children's early vocabulary development, offering a link between word and sensory experience not present in arbitrary forms. We suggest that, because onomatopoeia evoke imagery of the referent, children can draw from sensory experience to easily link onomatopoeic words to meaning, both when the referent is present as well as when it is absent. We use two sources of data: naturalistic observations of English-speaking caregiver-child interactions from 14 up to 54 months, to establish whether these words are present early in caregivers' speech to children, and experimental data to test whether English-speaking children can learn from onomatopoeia when it is present. Our results demonstrate that onomatopoeia: (1) are most prevalent in early child-directed language and in children's early productions; (2) are learnt more easily by children compared with non-iconic forms; and (3) are used by caregivers in contexts where they can support communication and facilitate word learning.

A central goal of research into language acquisition is explaining how, when learners generalize to new cases, they appropriately restrict their generalizations (e.g., to avoid producing ungrammatical utterances such as *the clown laughed the man; "*" indicates an ungrammatical form). The past 30 years have seen an unresolved debate between statistical preemption and entrenchment as explanations. Under preemption, the use of a verb in a particular construction (e.g., *the clown laughed the man) is probabilistically blocked by hearing that other verb constructions with similar meanings only (e.g., the clown made the man laugh). Under entrenchment, such errors (e.g., *the clown laughed the man) are probabilistically blocked by hearing any utterance that includes the relevant verb (e.g., by the clown made the man laugh and the man laughed). Across five artificial-language-learning studies, we designed a training regime such that learners received evidence for the (by the relevant hypothesis) ungrammaticality of a particular unattested verb/noun + particle combination (e.g., *chila + kem; *squeako + kem) via either preemption only or entrenchment only. Across all five studies, participants in the preemption condition (as per our preregistered prediction) rated unattested verb/noun + particle combinations as less acceptable for restricted verbs/nouns, which appeared during training, than for unrestricted, novel-at-test verbs/nouns, which did not appear during training, that is, strong evidence for preemption. Participants in the entrenchment condition showed no evidence for such an effect (and in 3/5 experiments, positive evidence for the null). We conclude that a successful model of learning linguistic restrictions must instantiate competition between different forms only where they express the same (or similar) meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on how children learn the mapping betweenwords and world has assumed that language is arbitrary, andhas investigated language learning in contexts in which objectsreferred to are present in the environment. Here, we reportanalyses of a semi-naturalistic corpus of caregivers talking totheir 2-3 year-old. We focus on caregivers’ use of non-arbitrarycues across different expressive channels: both iconic(onomatopoeia and representational gestures) and indexical(points and actions with objects). We ask if these cues are useddifferently when talking about objects known or unknown tothe child, and when the referred objects are present or absent.We hypothesize that caregivers would use these cues moreoften with objects novel to the child. Moreover, they would usethe iconic cues especially when objects are absent becauseiconic cues bring to the mind’s eye properties of referents. Wefind that cue distribution differs: all cues except points are morecommon for unknown objects indicating their potential role inlearning; onomatopoeia and representational gestures are morecommon for displaced contexts whereas indexical cues aremore common when objects are present. Thus, caregiversprovide multimodal non-arbitrary cues to support children’svocabulary learning and iconicity – specifically – can supportlinking mental representations for objects and labels.

We present an experimental study that examines how lexical iconicity (i.e. onomatopoeia) affects early word learning,across learning contexts. Children aged 24-36 months (N=37) were first trained on labels that are either iconic or neutralwith respect to the referent event, and then tested using a forced-choice task to select the correct referent given a label. Weassessed learning across two contexts: situated, where label and referent co-occur, and displaced, where children learn thelabel following the referent event. We predicted that iconicity would aid word learning, and would have a more facilitatoryeffect in the displaced condition, helping the child to associate label and referent. Our findings demonstrate that childrenlearn iconic labels in the experiment better than they do neutral labels. However, we find no difference across learningcontextsiconicity facilitates word learning in both situated and displaced learning scenarios.

Input variability is key in many aspects of linguistic learning, yet variability increases input complexity, which may cause difficulty in some learning contexts. The current work investigates this trade-off by comparing speaker variability effects on L2 vocabulary learning in different age groups. Existing literature suggests that speaker variability benefits L2 vocabulary learning in adults, but this may not be the case for younger learners. In this study native English-speaking adults, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 10- to 11-year-olds learned six novel Lithuanian words from a single speaker, and six from eight speakers. In line with previous research, adults showed better production of the multispeaker items at test. No such benefit was found for either group of children, either in production or comprehension. Children also had greater difficulties in processing multiple-speaker cues during training. We conclude that age-related capacity limitations may constrain the ability to utilize speaker variability when learning words in a new language.

Most language use is displaced, referring to past, future, or hypothetical events, posing the challenge of how children learn what words refer to when the referent is not physically available. One possibility is that iconic cues that imagistically evoke properties of absent referents support learning when referents are displaced. In an audio‐visual corpus of caregiver–child dyads, English‐speaking caregivers interacted with their children (N = 71, 24–58 months) in contexts in which the objects talked about were either familiar or unfamiliar to the child, and either physically present or displaced. The analysis of the range of vocal, manual, and looking behaviors caregivers produced suggests that caregivers used iconic cues especially in displaced contexts and for unfamiliar objects, using other cues when objects were present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5:2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN[subscript 1]N[subscript 2], paired with a novel abstract meaning: N[subscript 2] approaches N[subscript 1]. At the same time, we find that children are keenly sensitive to the input: they show knowledge of the construction after a single day of exposure but this grows stronger after 3 days; also, children generalize more readily to new verbs when the input contains more than one verb. (Contains 6 figures and 14 tables.)

Successful language acquisition involves generalization, but learners must balance this against the acquisition of lexical constraints. Such learning has been considered problematic for theories of acquisition: if learners generalize abstract patterns to new words, how do they learn lexically-based exceptions? One approach claims that learners use distributional statistics to make inferences about when generalization is appropriate, a hypothesis which has recently received support from Artificial Language Learning experiments with adult learners (Wonnacott, Newport, & Tanenhaus, 2008). Since adult and child language learning may be different (Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005), it is essential to extend these results to child learners. In the current work, four groups of children (6 years) were each exposed to one of four semi-artificial languages. The results demonstrate that children are sensitive to linguistic distributions at and above the level of particular lexical items, and that these statistics influence the balance between generalization and lexical conservatism. The data are in line with an approach which models generalization as rational inference and in particular with the predictions of the domain general hierarchical Bayesian model developed in Kemp, Perfors & Tenenbaum, 2006. This suggests that such models have relevance for theories of language acquisition.

Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated language learning and use. One prevalent feature of natural languages is that they avoid unpredictable variation. The current work explores whether linguistic predictability might result from a process of iterated learning in simple diffusion chains of adults. An iterated artificial language learning methodology was used, in which participants were organised into diffusion chains: the first individual in each chain was exposed to an artificial language which exhibited unpredictability in plural marking, and subsequent learners were exposed to the language produced by the previous learner in their chain. Diffusion chains, but not isolate learners, were found to cumulatively increase predictability of plural marking by lexicalising the choice of plural marker. This suggests that such gradual, cumulative population-level processes offer a possible explanation for regularity in language. (Contains 2 figures.)

We present a hierarchical Bayesian framework for modeling the acquisition of verb argument constructions. It embodies a domain-general approach to learning higher-level knowledge in the form of inductive constraints (or overhypotheses), and has been used to explain other aspects of language development such as the shape bias in learning object names. Here, we demonstrate that the same model captures several phenomena in the acquisition of verb constructions. Our model, like adults in a series of artificial language learning experiments, makes inferences about the distributional statistics of verbs on several levels of abstraction simultaneously. It also produces the qualitative learning patterns displayed by children over the time course of acquisition. These results suggest that the patterns of generalization observed in both children and adults could emerge from basic assumptions about the nature of learning. They also provide an example of a broad class of computational approaches that can resolve Baker's Paradox.

Acoustic emphasis may convey a range of subtle discourse distinctions, yet little is known about how this complex ability develops in children. This paper presents a first investigation of the factors which influence the production of acoustic prominence in young children's spontaneous speech. In a production experiment, SVO sentences were elicited from 4 year olds who were asked to describe events in a video. Children were found to place more acoustic prominence both on "new" words and on words that were "given" but had shifted to a more accessible position within the discourse. This effect of accessibility concurs with recent studies of adult speech. We conclude that, by age four, children show appropriate, adult-like use of acoustic prominence, suggesting sensitivity to a variety of discourse distinctions.

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur. Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing and on the role of semantics in this process. The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a "rational" procedure in determining their usage of these different input statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings.