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Data from child language comprehension shows that children make errors in interpreting pronouns as late as age 6;6, yet correctly comprehend reflexives from the age of 3;0. On the other hand, data from child language production shows that children correctly produce both pronouns and reflexives from the age of 2 or 3. Current explanations of this asymmetric delay in comprehension have either rejected the comprehension data outright or have argued that the problems are pragmatic or caused by processing limitations. In contrast, our account, formulated in the framework of Optimality Theory, handles the comprehension data as well as the production data by arguing that children acquire the ability to take into account the alternatives available to their conversational partner relatively late. It is this type of bidirectional optimization, we argue, that is necessary for correctly interpreting pronouns. 2 1. Children’s grasp of binding principles 1.1. Children’s comprehension of reflexives and pronouns There is a well-known asymmetry in children’s pattern of acquisition of the binding principles A and B. Children correctly interpret reflexives like adults from the age of 3;0 but they continue to perform poorly on the interpretation of pronouns even up to the age

“Origins of communicative disorders ” to Elizabeth Bates, and by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We are grateful to Larry Juarez and Meiti Opie The effects of focal brain injury are investigated in the first stages of language development, during the passage from first words to grammar. Parent report and/or free speech data are reported for 53 infants and preschool children between 10- 44 months of age. All children had suffered a single, unilateral brain injury to the left or right hemisphere, incurred before six months of age (usually in the pre- or perinatal period). This is the period in which we should expect to see maximal plasticity, but it is also the period in which the initial specializations of particular cortical regions ought to be most evident. In direct contradiction of hypotheses based on the adult aphasia literature, results from 10- 17 months suggest that children with righthemisphere injuries are at greater risk for delays in word comprehension, and in the gestures that normally precede and accompany language onset. Although there were no differences between left- vs. right-hemisphere injury per se on expressive language, children whose lesions include the left temporal lobe did show significantly greater delays in expressive vocabulary and

Two pygmy champanzees (Pan paniscus) have spontaneously begun to use symbols to communicate with people. In contrast to common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) using the same communicative system, the pygmy chimpanzees did not need explicit training in order to form referential symbolobject associations. Instead, they acquired symbols by observing others use these symbols in daily communications with them. In addition, the pygmy chimpanzees have begun to comprehend spoken English words and can readily identify lexigrams upon hearing the spoken words. By contrast, common chimpanzees who received similar exposure to spoken English are unable to do so. The older pygmy chimpanzee has begun to form requests of the form agent-verb-recipient in which he is neither the agent nor the recipient. By contrast, similarly aged common chimpanzees limited their requests to simple verbs, in wihch the agent was always presumed to be the addressee and the chimpanzee itself was always the recipient, thus they had no need to indicate a specific agent or recipient. These results suggest that these pygmy chimpanzees exhibit symbolic and auditory perceptual skills that are distinctly different from those of common chimpanzees. What's in a Name? The language acquisition capacity of apes has been the focus

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To learn a language, the learners must first learn its words, the essential building blocks for utterances. The difficulty in learning words lies in the unavailability of explicit word boundaries in speech input. The learners have to infer lexical items with some innately endowed learning mechanism(s) for regularity detection- regularities in the speech normally indicate word patterns. With respect to Zipf's least-effort principle and Chomsky's thoughts on the minimality of grammar for human language, we hypothesise a cognitive mechanism underlying language learning that seeks for the least-effort representation for input data. Accordingly, lexical learning is to infer the minimal-cost representation for the input under the constraint of permissible representation for lexical items. The main theme of this thesis is to examine how far this learning mechanism can go in unsupervised lexical learning from real language data without any pre-defined (e.g., prosodic and phonotactic) cues, but entirely resting on statistical induction of structural patterns for the most economic representation for the data. We first review

Introduction This research examines how children begin learning the meanings of words. Necessarily, novice word-learners must start by pairing a word form with the scenes in which it occurs, collecting several such pairs, and then identifying the common element in the scenes. Before children have learned many words or any language specific syntax, this extralinguistic context is the only information source they can draw on. However, there has been relatively little research on the details of cross-situational observation. We do not know just how much information is actually available in the extralinguistic contexts of word use. Nor do we know how the properties of this information source might shape what children learn in the initial stages of vocabulary acquisition or the process by which they learn it. The studies that follow begin to address these questions. They focus exclusively on the informational content of the input. They do not explore whether this information is accessible

This thesis describes HABLAR, a computational model of the sensorimotor foundations of early childhood phonological development. HABLAR (an acronym for "Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language Acquisition by Reinforcement learning" and Spanish for "to speak") is intended to replicate the major milestones of emerging speech and demonstrate key characteristics of normal development, including the phonetic characteristics of babble, systematic and context-sensitive patterns of sound substitutions and deletions, overgeneralization errors, and the emergence of adult phonemic organization. It should also mimic abnormal phonological development under certain conditions of damage or degradation. HABLAR simulates a complete sensorimotor system consisting of an auditory system that detects and categorizes speech sounds using only acoustic cues drawn from its linguistic environment, an articulatory system that generates synthetic speech based on a realistic computer model of the vocal tract, an...

Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues have provided us with yet another ground-breaking investigation into the linguistic abilities (or "quasi-linguistic abilities " — see below) of our nearest phylogenetic neighbor, the chimpanzee. Their monograph begins with some brief but useful reviews of the primate language literature, and the literature on early comprehension and production of language in human children. The authors document the peculiar bias toward production and the relative neglect of comprehension that have characterized the child language literature, and they ask a perfectly reasonable question: If we want to understand what an organism knows about language, isn't comprehension a better place to start? And if we want to compare knowledge of language in two related species, how can we draw any firm conclusions if our work is based exclusively on what the animal can produce?