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Language, Journal of Semantics, Linguistics and Philosophy and Studies in Language. 2 In Construction Grammar, grammatical patterns are conventional pairings of form and meaning that are analogous to words. This article contrasts Construction Grammar with competing syntactic theories that are based on universal constraints and the projection properties of words. It reviews arguments for construction-based syntax derived from the following linguistic phenomena: semantic and syntactic variability of verbs, coercion, idiomatic patterns and ‘family resemblances ’ among idioms, paradigm-based constraints on form and meaning, exceptions to cross-construction generalizations, and the inadequacy of derivational rules. Verbal and nominal syntax are used to exemplify the formal mechanism that combines constructions and words, unification grammar. A concluding section outlines connections between Construction Grammar and use-based models of grammar, acquisition and sentence processing. 3 1.

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Where does grammar come from? How does it develop in children? Developmental psycholinguists who set out to answer these questions quickly find themselves impaled upon the horns of a dilemma, caught up in a modern variant of the ancient war between empiricists and nativists. Indeed, some of the fiercest battles in this war have been waged in the field of child language. Many reasonable individuals in this field have argued for a middle ground, but such a compromise has proven elusive thus far, in part because the middle ground is difficult to define. So let us begin with some definitions. The core of this debate is about epistemology, a branch of philosophy that we can define as “The study of knowledge, its form and source, and the process by which it comes to be. ” Within this framework, empiricism can be defined as “The belief that knowledge originates in the environment and comes into the mind/brain through the

“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

Cross-linguistic similarities and differences in early lexical and grammatical development are reported for 1001 English-speaking children and 386 Italian-speaking children between 1;6 and 2;6. Parents completed the English or Italian versions of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences, a parent report instrument that provides information about vocabulary size, vocabulary composition and grammatical complexity across this age range. The onset and subsequent growth of nouns, predicates, function words and social terms proved to be quite similar in both languages. No support was found for the prediction that verbs would emerge earlier in Italian, although Italians did produce a higher proportion of social terms, and there were small but intriguing differences in the shape of the growth curve for grammatical function words. A strikingly similar nonlinear relationship between grammatical complexity and vocabulary size was observed in both languages, and examination of the order in which function words are acquired also yielded more similarities than differences. However, a comparison of the longest sentences reported for a subset of children demonstrates large cross-linguistic differences in the

An increasing number of connectionist models have been proposed to explain behavioral deficits in developmental disorders. These simulations motivate serious consideration of the theoretical implications of the claim that a developmental disorder fits within the parameter space of a particular computational model of normal development. The authors examine these issues in depth with respect to a series of new simulations investigating past-tense formation in Williams syndrome. This syndrome and the past-tense domain are highly relevant because both have been used to make strong theoretical claims about the processes underlying normal language acquisition. The authors conclude that computational models have great potential to advance psychologists ’ understanding of developmental deficits because they focus on the developmental process itself as a pivotal causal factor in producing atypical phenotypic outcomes. Computational models have become an increasingly prevalent tool for investigating mechanisms of change within cognitive development (e.g., Simon & Halford, 1995). Much of this research has used connectionist learning systems (i.e., computer models loosely based on principles of neural information processing) to construct cognitive-level explanations of behavior (Elman et al.,

this article were implemented using software developed by Michael Harm, whom we also thank

The goal of this study was to test the effectiveness of a Language Wizard/Player with Baldi, a computer-animated tutor, for teaching new vocabulary items to children with a hearing loss. Eight students with hearing loss, between the ages of six and ten, were tested and trained for about 20-30 minutes a day on 2 days a week for about 10 weeks on three categories of eight words each. The design of the experiment was based on a within-student multiple baseline design in which all three categories of words were continuously being tested while one of the categories was being trained. Knowledge of the words remained negligible without training and learning occurred fairly quickly for all words once training began, reaching asymptotic levels in each category. Knowledge of the trained words did not degrade after training once these words ended and training on other words took place. Finally, retention was nearly perfect, as indicated by a reassessment test four weeks after the experiment.

This paper presents an analysis of the role of input size and generativity (ability to produce novel utterances) in simulating developmental data on a phenomenon in first language acquisition. An existing model that has already simulated the basic phenomenon is trained on input sets of varying sizes (13,000 to 40,000 utterances). The ability of the model to produce novel utterances is also manipulated. Both input size and generativity affect the fits for later stages of development. Higher generativity improves fits for later stages, but worsens them for early stages, suggesting generativity is best increased as a function of mean length of utterance (MLU). The effect of training set is variable. Results are discussed in terms of optimal training sets for simulations, and children’s developing ability to produce utterances beyond the input they have heard.