All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children’s knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children’s and adults’ performance is additionally semantically constrained, varying according to the distance between the semantics of the verb and those of the construction. In a forced‐choice pointing study (Experiment 1), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and adults (...) (N = 60) showed support for the prediction of this semantic construction prototype account of an interaction such that the observed disadvantage for passives as compared to actives (i.e., fewer correct points/longer reaction time) was greater for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient and theme‐experiencer verbs (e.g., Bob was seen/hit/frightened by Wendy). Similarly, in a production/priming study (Experiment 2), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) produced fewer passives for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient/theme‐experiencer verbs. We conclude that these findings are difficult to explain under accounts based on the notion of A(rgument) movement or of a monostratal, semantics‐free, level of syntax, and instead necessitate some form of semantic construction prototype account. (shrink)

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization, Pinker proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and production priming studies have cast doubt upon this claim, finding no difference between highly affecting agent-patient/theme-experiencer passives and non-actional experiencer theme passives. (...) The present study provides evidence that a semantic constraint is psychologically real, and is readily observed when more fine-grained independent and dependent measures are used. We conclude that a semantic constraint on the passive must be incorporated into accounts of the adult grammar. (shrink)

Structural priming offers a powerful method for experimentally investigating the mental representation of linguistic structure. We clarify the nature of our proposal, justify the versatility of priming, consider alternative approaches, and discuss how our specific account can be extended to new questions as part of an interdisciplinary programme integrating linguistics and psychology as part of the cognitive sciences of language.

According to usage-based theories, children initially acquire surface-level constructions and then abstract representations. If so, bilingual children might show lags relative to monolingual children early in acquisition, but not later on, once they rely on abstract representations. We tested this prediction with comprehension of passives in 3- to 6-year-old children: French–English bilinguals and English monolinguals. As predicted, younger bilingual children tended to be less accurate than monolingual children. In contrast, the older bilingual children scored equivalently to monolinguals, despite less exposure (...) to English. When the children made errors, the bilingual children were more likely to interpret the subject as the agent of the action than the monolingual children. These results are consistent with the argument that children develop increasingly abstract representations of linguistic constructions with usage. They further suggest that bilingual children might catch up with monolingual through use of selective attention and/or a semantic bias. (shrink)

An experimental study was conducted on children aged 2;6–3;0 and 3;6–4;0 investigating the priming effect of two WANT-constructions to establish whether constructional competition contributes to English-speaking children's infinitival to omission errors. In two between-participant groups, children either just heard or heard and repeated WANT-to, WANT-X, and control prime sentences after which to-infinitival constructions were elicited. We found that both age groups were primed, but in different ways. In the 2;6–3;0 year olds, WANT-to primes facilitated the provision of to in target (...) utterances relative to the control contexts, but no significant effect was found for WANT-X primes. In the 3;6–4;0 year olds, both WANT-to and WANT-X primes showed a priming effect, namely WANT-to primes facilitated and WANT-X primes inhibited provision of to. We argue that these effects reflect developmental differences in the level of proficiency in and preference for the two constructions, and they are broadly consistent with “priming as implicit learning” accounts. The current study shows that children as young as 2;6–3;0 years of age can be primed when they have only heard particular constructions, children are acquiring at least two constructions for the matrix verb WANT, and that these two WANT-constructions compete for production. (shrink)

Caregivers’ language input supports children’s language development, and it is often tuned to the child’s current level of skill. Evidence suggests that parental input is tuned to accommodate children’s expressive language levels, but accommodation to receptive language abilities is less understood. In particular, little is known about parental sensitivity to children’s abilities to process language in real time. Compared to nonspectrum children, children on the spectrum are slower to process language. In this study, we ask: Do parents of autistic children (...) and those of nonspectrum children tune their language input to accommodate children’s different language processing abilities? Children with and without a diagnosis of autism and their parents viewed a display of six images, one of which was the target. The parent labeled the target to direct the child’s attention to it. We first examined children’s language processing abilities by assessing their latencies to shift gaze to the labeled referent; from this, we found slower latencies in the autistic group than in the nonspectrum group, in line with previous findings. We then examined features of parents’ language and found that parents in both groups produced similar language, suggesting that parents may not adjust their language input according to children’s speed of language processing. This finding suggests that capturing parental sensitivity to children’s receptive language, and specifically language processing, may enrich our models of individual differences in language input, and future work should investigate if supporting caregivers in tuning their language use according to children’s language processing can improve children’s language outcomes. (shrink)