- Learning verbs in English and Korean: The roles of word order and argument drop (Advisor: Sudha Arunachalam)
In this project, we examined what linguistic contexts better support novel verb learning across languages. Specifically, we looked at if the different linguistic properties (word order and argument drop) affect verb learning in English and Korean-speaking children.
- Processing Demand in Verb Learning (Advisor: Sudha Arunachalam)
Arunachalam and Waxman (2011) found that semantically rich contexts (e.g., “the boy is pilking the balloon”) are more supportive for children’s verb learning than semantically sparse contexts (e.g., “he is pilking it”). However, He, Kon, and Arunachalam (2020) found that rich semantic context is NOT more supportive for young children. One reason might be that the richer context exhausted young child’s processing recourses, so no recourses were left for them to process the meaning of novel verbs. In this project, we explored if children learn better when we reduce the processing demand but still provide a rich semantic context for verb learning.
- Adolescents’ Production of Past Tense Counterfactual Sentences: Elicitation Contexts and Response Modalities (Advisor: Christina Reuterskiöld)
Past Tense Counterfactual (PTCF) sentences are complex in comprehension and form. We explored at what age PTCF sentences will be fully developed. We also examine if the production of PTCF sentences varies by elicitation task and response modality.
- Intentional communication of semantic categories: From Assessment to Intervention (Christina Reuterskiöld, Nelson Moses, Huanhuan Shi and Harriet Klein)
We are curious if children’s early vocabularies show similarities in terms of semantic categories across languages. We examined 19-month-old children’s vocabulary with data from the Wordbank. The project includes five languages: English Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Mandarin Chinese. Children’s production vocabularies were coded using the Content Form and Use (C/F/U) system. We ask if there is there evidence across languages that the early semantic categories are expressed in early language development across a range of languages?