BUCLD 49 schedule

Downloadable list of author contacts (password protected).

Fri | Sat | Sun | Fri posters | Sat posters

Thursday, November 7, 2024

1:00 – 6:00
SOCIETY FOR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT SYMPOSIUM: Neural Coding in Speech, Language and Cognition METCALF LARGE
6:30 – 7:30
STUDENT WORKSHOP – Understanding industry job ads: How to match your (existing!) skills to companies’ requirements Dr. Cindy Blanco (Duolingo) CONFERENCE AUDITORIUM Abstract Non-academic job ads are a genre of their own—and this workshop will introduce you to the vocabulary, metrics, and skills you’ll need to understand them and to craft a brand-new resume. We’ll analyze real job ads, brainstorm ways to address each requirement, and discuss common oversights. This workshop is designed for academics at all stages, no matter your field and whether you’re committed to industry or just curious.

Friday, November 8th, 2024

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Session A East Balcony	Session B Conference Auditorium	Session C Terrace Lounge
Neural underpinnings	Parent-child interaction	Heritage language users
9:00 – 9:30
The relation of home literacy environment to brain specialization for phonological and semantic processing for children 5-8 years old. Alisha B. Compton, Anna Banaszkiewicz, Jin Wang and James R. Booth This study investigated the relation between the home literacy environment (HLE) and phonological and semantic functional specialization in 5-6- (N=33) and 7-8-year-old children (N=76). Phonological and semantic processing are critical components of language comprehension. Phonological and semantic specialization have been established for 5-8-year-old children. Prior studies indicate HLE relates to language processing behaviorally and in the brain. Although HLE is related to brain activation during language tasks, whether HLE supports phonological and semantic specialization remains unknown. This study used fMRI sound and meaning judgment tasks. Results suggest a relation between HLE – measured as frequency of family-to-child reading – and phonological specialization in 5-6-year-olds in left superior temporal gyrus (STG), and semantic specialization in 7-8-year-olds in left STG, left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Additionally, within-task analyses revealed relations between HLE and phonological processing in 5-6-year-olds (in STG) and semantic processing in 7-8-year-olds (in MTG).	What is the Baby “Saying”? Adults’ Interpretation of Infants’ Pointing Gestures. Ran Wei, Ulf Liszkowski, Paul Harris and Meredith Rowe Across cultural contexts, infants’ pointing gestures are foundational to the development of intentional and adaptable communication. Previous research has proposed that early pointing gestures may convey requestive, expressive, informative, and interrogative intents. Nevertheless, it remains unknown how adults interpret infants’ intents conveyed through pointing gestures. We adopted the Human Simulation Paradigm to measure adults’ interpretations of video clips of infants’ pointing gestures through an online survey. Through three studies with adult students in the U.S., American parents, and German parents, we ask whether adults’ interpretation of infants’ index-finger pointing gestures aligns with the taxonomy in the current literature, and whether these interpretations differ according to cultural backgrounds and experience caring for infants. Results suggest adults reliably interpreted infants’ “correct” intents expressed via the prototypical pointing gestures regardless of their experience caring for infants or their cultural background suggesting that the capability to interpret pointing gestures may be a universal aptitude.	Switching the Majority Language: The case of Heritage Greek in North and South America. Evangelia Daskalaki, Aretousa Giannakou, Christina Haska and Vicky Chondrogianni This study examined the acquisition of Greek under the influence of Spanish and English. In particular, we focused on vocabulary and grammar and collected data from (i) a group of Greek-Spanish bilingual children who speak Greek as an HL in South America (SA), and (ii) a group of Greek-English bilingual children who speak Greek as an HL in North America (NA). The two groups differed in their amount of Greek exposure (SA<NA) but were matched on age and HL proficiency. They were administered a picture-naming task targeting vocabulary (that included both cognates and non-cognates), and two sentence completion tasks that targeted the form and placement of referential expressions. We found facilitatory effects when Spanish was the ML across all domains except the domain of null subjects and object clitics. This finding supports the conclusion that the typological proximity with the ML may boost heritage children’s performance, even under reduced input.
9:30 – 10:00
The Changing Roles of the Language and Attention Systems in Statistical Learning Across Development. Anqi Hu, Katherine Trice, Pradyumna Lanka and Zhenghan Qi Children learn languages more successfully than adults. However, the mechanisms underlying children’s language learning advantage remain under investigated. Statistical learning (SL) is a fundamental building block for language development. Understanding SL mechanisms across development may explain why children learn languages better than adults. This study thus examined the neurodevelopmental changes of SL in the language and attention networks, which undergo significant changes across development. Forty adults and twenty-eight 5-to-12-year-old children completed a Syllable SL task in the scanner, where they listened to a structured syllable sequence containing triplet patterns and a random syllable sequence. Children’s language and attention networks showed greater sensitivity to linguistic patterns than adults. The plasticity of the language network emerged earlier in children than adults. Children also showed a greater decouplng between networks than adults during the later stage of learning. Future research should explore if children’s enhanced short-term functional plasticity leads to better language outcomes.	Connections between real-time point comprehension and overall gesture and word knowledge in infancy. Lillianna Righter and Elika Bergelson Early gestures like pointing have well-established, robust links with early language. We ask whether improvements in point comprehension around age 1 relate to early receptive and productive vocabulary, and gesture vocabulary, within infants, using a box search task (Behne et al, 2012) and the English Words and Gestures CDI. In a sample of 37 infants, we find robust positive relationships between point comprehension performance and each of three factors: age, productive vocabulary, and gesture use. We replicate prior work on pointing and set groundwork for examining an ordered relationship between the onset of point comprehension and vocabulary growth.	Comprehension and production of which-questions in child heritage speakers of Romanian: The role of DOM and number agreement. Anamaria Bentea and Theodoros Marinis This study compares the comprehension and production of Romanian subject and object which-questions in child heritage speakers and monolingually-raised children and aims to understand whether a. morphosyntactic cues like Differential Object Marking/DOM and number agreement guide online interpretation in heritage language/HL and monolingually-raised children and b. whether HL children use these cues in their production. The results of a visual-world eye-tracking task showed similar processing patterns in monolinguals and HL children for subject questions, which overall displayed more looks to Target images than object questions. The data also revealed a higher proportion of looks to Target in object-questions with number mismatch than in questions with number match, but only in the monolingual group. The results of an elicited production task indicate that monolingual children produce significantly more target subject and object which-questions than HL children, but number mismatch does not enhance which-question production in either group.
10:00 – 10:30
Receptive language development in children born to mothers with gestational diabetes mellitus. Jennifer R. Barbosa, Lauren C. Shuffrey, William P. Fifer and Laura Lakusta Although research has progressed in understanding the components of language, the neurobiology of language is still not well understood. Our study explores children exposed to Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM), aiming to understand the relationship between receptive language components and neural processes. GDM, affecting about 10% of pregnancies in the US, alters the in-utero environment and can lead to neurodevelopmental changes relevant to language development. Previous studies have shown mixed results regarding the impact of GDM on language (Dionne et al., 2008; Krakowiak et al., 2012). To address this, we conducted a study with 32 children, assessing receptive language using the QUILS/QUILS:ES via Zoom. Hierarchical linear regressions, controlling for sex and age, found no significant differences in receptive language between GDM-exposed children and controls. These findings suggest that receptive language may be preserved in GDM-exposed children, warranting further research into the underlying neurobiological pathways.	Language Input in the Amazonian Indigenous Context: A case study from Panãra. Jessamine Jeter, Naja Ferjan Ramirez and Myriam Lapierre While existing language acquisition research suggests that child-directed speech (CDS) is an ideal type of input for children, this work largely focuses on children in Western settings where CDS is the cultural norm (e.g. ManyBabies Consortium, 2020). Panãra cultural practices differ greatly from those in Western societies: Panãra society is not child-centered, and qualitative ethnographic reports suggest CDS infrequent (Ewart, 2008). This is the first quantitative study of the Panãra linguistic environment. We collected and analyzed 13 day-long recordings of Panãra infants. Data suggests that Panãra infants spend the bulk of their day with multiple adults, as opposed to being in one-on-one interactions, as is common for Western children. Additionally more than half of Panãra infants’ language input comes from other-directed vocalizations (ODV), rather than CDS. Taken together, these results suggest that Panãra children may learn to ‘tune in’ to ODV to extract the necessary linguistic information.	Heritage speakers’ perceptual phonological advantage over non-native listeners is not a universal phenomenon. Matthew Ayobami Ajibade Heritage speakers are often recognized for their phonological advantage over adult non-native listeners. To further explore this well-known phenomenon, we conducted a study on the perceptual discrimination of Yoruba place of articulation and voicing contrasts in labial-velar, labial, and velar stops. Participants included native Yoruba (NY) speakers, heritage Yoruba (HY) speakers, and naïve listeners (NL). Our findings revealed varying levels of performance across these groups, depending on the specific contrasts. Although all three groups effectively discriminated most contrasts, the results from the labial-velar versus labial contrast and the voicing contrast in labial-velar were particularly noteworthy. In the voicing contrasts, HY speakers demonstrated an advantage over NL. However, in the labial-velar versus labial contrast, the performance of both groups was comparable. These results challenge the belief in a universal phonological advantage for heritage speakers over non-native listeners, suggesting that such advantages may be contrast-dependent and not universally applicable.

10:30 – 11:00
BREAK

Session A East Balcony	Session B Conference Auditorium	Session C Terrace Lounge
Language input	Blind / low-vision populations	Syntax
11:00 – 11:30
Validity of a gamified statistical learning task as a measure of childrens’ real-world language learning. Brynn Siles, Anqi Hu, Kelly Chan, Anna Ciriello, Morten H. Christiansen and Zhenghan Qi It is not clear whether the artificial language learning paradigms in traditional statistical learning (SL) tasks relate to childrens’ real-world language learning capabilities. The current study investigates the relationship between a statistical learning task and a phonemic serial recall (PSRT) task designed to reflect children’s sensitivity to natural statistical patterns in language inputs. In the SL task, children were exposed to a stream of speech syllables with embedded triplets, then asked to repeat sequences containing familiar or unfamiliar triplets. In the PSRT task, children were asked to repeat sequences made up of high-frequency or low-frequency bi-syllable combinations, based on the CHILDES database. The difference score for the average number of correct syllables for SICR ((familiar – foil)/(familiar + foil)) and PSRT ((high-frequency – low-frequency)/(high-frequency + low-frequency)) were significantly correlated (R = 0.31, p = 0.0072). This provides a mechanistic link between childrens’ statistical learning tasks and real-world language learning capabilities.	Examining early speech production in blind and sighted infants: babbling, words, and repetitions. Eugenia Lukin and Elika Bergelson Congenitally blind infants show a delay in early vocabulary production, but analogous language skills in adulthood. We investigated blind infants’ earliest productions relative to age-matched sighted peers. In a corpus of daylong recordings (n=16/group), we classified vocalizations as noncanonical babbling, canonical babbling, single-word utterances, and multi-word utterances. Words were further classified into exact repetitions, partial repetitions, and nonrepetitions. Repetitions were also tagged for pragmatic functions. We found that blind infants produce fewer vocalizations than their sighted peers of all types, and a significantly lower proportion of canonical babble. We further found that blind infants’ produced exact repetitions relatively more often than sighted peers, and half as many self-repetitions. Implications for early language learning mechanisms and trajectories in the context of sensory differences are discussed.	Elided questions in child Spanish: Where do prepositions go? Victoria Mateu and Nina Hyams Spanish prepositions can be omitted under sluicing, challenging the P-Stranding Generalization. Several analyses have been proposed –the ellipsis site (i) involves no movement, (ii) is reanalyzed as a cleft to avoid a violation, (iii) is isomorphic, P-stranding violations are repaired. Given children’s well-known subject>object asymmetry in wh-questions, the latter two analyses predict a subject sluice advantage. Moreover, if omitted P sluices involve reanalysis, children should perform better when the P is explicit.
11:30 – 12:00
Getting the message across: Acoustic realization of information in maternal child-directed speech. Bhuvana Narasimhan, Rebecca Scarborough, Allison Hilger, Kanupriya Kale, Justin Bai, Chloe Circenis, Tessa Moskoff, Zohar Naaman and Conner Moses Child-directed speech (CDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) in its acoustic features (e.g., pitch modulations, lengthened and hyperarticulated speech sounds) which regulate arousal and attention, help children interpret emotional signals, and highlight linguistic units that facilitate language learning. That is, they produce affective or pedagogical benefits. However, caregivers may also adjust their speech for informational reasons, to increase the salience of difficult-to-process message elements. We investigated how caregivers, specifically mothers, adjusted speech to children versus adults when conveying messages varying in difficulty. Findings show that mothers increased vowel duration when conveying difficult-to-process (corrective) information to children versus adults, supporting an informational motivation for speech modifications in CDS. But pitch is only influenced by listener type, thus not all acoustic features serve to improve message intelligibility. By simultaneously examining listener- and message-driven effects, our study extends understanding of the communicative and cognitive factors motivating acoustic variation in maternal speech.	Lexical Tone Sensitivity in Blind, Non-Tone Language Speakers. Nancy Eng, Stanley Chen, Lauren Levy and Zarina Rakhmanova Ability of blind, non-tone language speakers to attend to lexical tone was evaluated. Previous studies have they superior auditory processing skills and enhanced verbal memory, outperforming sighted people on pitch discrimination, phoneme identification, rapid speech processing, and recall of letter and word sequences. Thus, we hypothesized that English-speaking, blind people are more sensitive than their sighted counterparts in using pitch contours for lexical access. Twelve monolingual English speakers without any exposure to tone languages, participated in this study. Six blind and six sighted speakers participated on word learning and sentence verification tasks to access attention to lexical tone. Results revealed that blind participants were significantly more to lexical tones than their sighted counterparts. Additionally, the blind group’s response accuracy gradually increased over time for the blind group but not for the sighted group. Findings suggest that sensory compensation may extend to the processing and learning of unfamiliar linguistic features.	Attention influences children’s order of mention in conjoined noun phrases but not in transitive sentences. Sarah Dolscheid and Martina Penke There are close links between the allocation of attention and language production in adult speakers. However, the same is unknown for children. To address this open issue, we tested 4- to 5-year-old German-speaking children in two picture description tasks using eye tracking: a noun pair naming task and a picture-based event description task. We manipulated children’s attention by means of a brief cue presented in the place where the left character/the patient was about to appear. In both tasks, visual cueing was highly effective in modulating children’s attention. However, while attentional orienting affected children’s order of mention during the production of simple conjoined noun phrases, the same did not apply to the production of event descriptions that require the production of more complex syntactic structures such as passives. Taken together, effects of attention differed depending on syntactic complexity, hence demonstrating a complex interrelationship between attention and language production in children.
12:00 – 12:30
Perception precedes production past preschool, but children may learn the uncertainty of their own speech sounds. Sarah Creel, Anges Vu and Kristie McCrary Kambourakis A persistent puzzle in child language acquisition is how much a child’s production reflects their perception. In infancy, perception far exceeds production: infants distinguish speech sounds they cannot yet produce. What of older children? We recorded 72 3-5-year-oldsnaming 24 pictures aloud, either before or after an experimenter named the same pictures. Then the child heard each recorded name played back (e.g. “wun”) as four pictures appeared (run, one, ship, chip). They pointed to the picture they thought had been named as eye movements to pictures were tracked. At least for the sounds tested, young children’s perception of their own speech was less accurate than adults’ speech by about 13%. This is consistent with a Perceptual-Precedence Hypothesis. However, they appear less sure of their own accurate productions when those productions could be a different sound, supporting the Multiple Representations Hypothesis. Children may perceptually learn childlike speech patterns, possibly their own.	Differential effects of syntactic complexity in congenitally blind and sighted individuals: evidence from self-paced listening and reading. Emily Silvano, Ziqi Chen, Zaida McClinton and Marina Bedny This study examines how sensory experience influences language processing in people born blind. Unlike sighted individuals, who use visual cues and prosody to understand sentences complex sentences as garden path sentences, blind participants rely more on prosody. To investigate whether the advantage blind individuals have in processing garden path sentences is due to their heightened sensitivity to prosody, we conducted an experiment where prosody was removed from a listening experiment and a reading experiment was added. 23 blind and 22 sighted participants took part in self-paced listening and reading experiments. Results indicated that, without prosody, blind participants had a greater GP cost in spoken sentence comprehension but not in reading. This suggests that blind individuals heavily depend on prosody cues. Future research will further explore the role of prosody in language processing for blind individuals. These findings support the hypothesis that lack of visual referential cues enhances sensitivity to prosody.	Clitics as prerequisites for Spanish DOM. Penelope Daniel Spanish has a well-known differential argument marking (DOM) pattern, where only animate, specific objects receive the case-marker a. Torrego (1998) argues that Spanish DOM involves a form of object shift, which raises specific objects into a position with special semantic and case-marking properties. Schaeffer (1997), building on Sportiche (1996), similarly argues that object shift in Dutch raises specific objects to the same position where object clitics are base-generated. I investigate whether Spanish DOM is connected to the Spanish clitic system: if languages differ in whether they provide this special clitic position, is its presence a ‘prerequisite’ for DOM in Spanish? If so, we may expect children to acquire clitics at least as early as DOM. I investigated longitudinal corpus data of 10 native Spanish-speaking children. There was a significant positive correlation between the acquisition of clitics and DOM, as well as a significant ordering effect, with children acquiring clitics first.

12:30 – 2:00
LUNCH BREAK + NIH/NSF FUNDING SYMPOSIUM (CONFERENCE AUDITORIUM)

Session A East Balcony	Session B Conference Auditorium	Session C Terrace Lounge
Infant-directed speech	Understanding events	Semantics
2:00 – 2:30
Infant’s preference for and comprehension of child-produced speech. Federica Bulgarelli Infants’ language development is tied to their linguistic experiences, but most of this research has focused on what infants hear from adult caregivers and how infants understand words produced by adults. However, children do not exclusively interact with adults, and speech from other children could influence learning. We ask if 9-14-month-olds 1) exhibit a preference for child-produced vs. adult-produced speech and 2) whether child-produced speech is harder to comprehend. Participants did not exhibit a preference for listening to adult- or child-produced speech in the preference task. In the comprehension task, younger infants (9-11-month-olds) did not exhibit above chance word comprehension. Older infants (12-14-month-olds) exhibited above chance word comprehension during the target window (367-2000ms post target word onset), but participants without older siblings exhibited better comprehension for adult-produced speech compared to child-produced speech. While infants do not prefer listening to child- or adult-produced speech, real-world experience influences processing of child-produced speech.	The role of language in building one and two-place predicates: event imitation in homesigners. Irene Canudas Grabolosa, Madeline Quam, Marie Coppola, Jesse C. Snedeker and Annemarie Kocab A key question in developmental psychology and linguistics is whether language merely expresses pre-existing concepts or provides new cognitive tools. De Villiers and colleagues suggest that abstract transitive relationships can only be reliably encoded via language, supporting this claim with evidence that infants and adults struggle with transitive role differentiation without language. This study examines adult Nicaraguan homesigners, an ideal case study because they lack conventional language but create personal communication systems. Homesigners and English-speaking five-year-olds were tested in an imitation task, revealing that both groups could accurately encode transitive relationships, with no significant differences between groups or event types. In the critical two-participant condition, performance was well above chance for both groups. These results suggest that the ability to encode and generalize transitive relationships exists independently of conventional language.	Highlighting the presupposition trigger helps: Evidence from Mandarin-acquiring children’s interpretation of presuppositional you ‘again’. Ting Xu, Lyn Tieu and Stella Christie Previous studies of the presupposition trigger ‘again’ have used the Truth Value Judgment Task, reporting successful acquisition by preschoolers. Yet these studies also excluded a number of child participants who responded as though they had ignored the trigger. A recent study with Mandarin-acquiring children used a Question Answer Task and found that the majority answered the questions as if ignoring the trigger ‘you’ (‘again’). In the current study, 52 Mandarin-speaking children (4;01—5;12; M=4;10) and 33 adult controls participated in a Felicity Judgment Task. They listened to stories and judged which of two characters answered better after each story. Results showed children successfully understood the presuppositional trigger (albeit not at fully adult-like levels). We discuss why children might have failed to exhibit sensitivity to ‘you’ (‘again’) in previous tasks, considering the salience of the presupposition and potential differences in children’s and adults’ ability to locally accommodate presuppositions.
2:30 – 3:00
Consonants of infant-directed speech are hardly more intelligible than consonants of adult-directed speech, and what this implies for infant word segmentation models. Daniel Swingley Infant-directed speech is sometimes argued to be phonetically clearer than adult-directed speech. Maybe, but how clear is it? In several experiments, we asked native English speakers to identify the consonants in about 3600 VCV clips extracted from word onsets or offsets of IDS (Brent corpus) or ADS (Buckeye), under various conditions. Coda consonants were no clearer in IDS than ADS, with fewer than ¼ identified better than 50% of the time. Onset consonants were slightly clearer in IDS (60% correct) than ADS (50% correct). The task was feasible (many consonants were correctly categorized) but even in IDS, most consonants were not reliably identifiable, even in full sentence contexts low-pass-filtered to restrict access to the lexicon (Expt. 2). I will argue that computational-modeling approaches should not assume that infant word segmentation operates over strings of correctly identified phonetic categories, and will discuss some surprising patterns in the results.	American Sign Language transitive sentence comprehension strategies by deaf English-ASL bilinguals: the role of early language environment. Qi Cheng Most deaf individuals in the U.S. are English-ASL bilinguals with vastly different early language environments. This study examined the role of early language environment (native, early ASL, early Manually Coded English, early Oral) on ASL sentence comprehension strategies among deaf adults using bilingual proficiency tests and an ASL sentence-picture matching task. Our findings suggest that some non-native signers without early ASL exposure show less robust use of ASL word order and overall low bilingual proficiency. These findings indicate that early MCE signing and oral experience may not provide sufficient language input to support a robust first language foundation for ASL syntactic development.	Children’s acquisition of Hindi kinship terms: A study of partial word knowledge. Nina Schoener and Mahesh Srinivasan Although some words can be rapidly learned, others exhibit a protracted trajectory, in which a child’s initial production of a word can precede their full, adult-like understanding by months or years. The present studies probe the developmental trajectory of Hindi kinship terms which are relational, abstract, and semantically complex. Across two studies, we examined full and partial knowledge of kinship terms among Hindi-speaking children. We found that kinship terms that integrate more semantic features have a longer learning trajectory, and that semantic features which are more perceptually-available, like gender, are included in children’s representations earlier than more abstract features like lineage and consanguinity. We also found that children’s kinship-term definitions initially rely on stereotypical characteristics of individuals rather than familial relations (in line with a characteristic-to-defining shift). Together, these studies demonstrate how investigating children’s partial knowledge of difficult words can illuminate the developmental processes through which such words are acquired.
3:00 – 3:30
An acoustic study of pitch features of infant- and adult-directed speech in first and second languages. Fenqi Wang, Andrew Cheng, Farzana Ali, Antonius Tam and Henny Yeung This study examines pitch features in infant- and adult-directed speech (IDS/ADS) among bilingual caregivers speaking Cantonese (L1) and English (L2) in Anglophone Canada. Data from seven families with 14 caregivers were analyzed using LENA recordings. A Praat script extracted pitch features from 4,921 audio clips, which were then analyzed using linear mixed-effects regression models. Results showed that for mothers, pitch was higher in IDS regardless of language, while for fathers, pitch was lower overall in L2. There were no interactions between register and language for either group. Additionally, mothers showed no significant difference in pitch variation, whereas fathers exhibited less pitch variation in IDS compared to ADS. These findings highlight distinct pitch patterns in IDS and ADS among bilingual parents and suggest cultural variations in pitch use within multilingual families.	Failures Succeed in Affirming Negation: Event perception and negator learning. Victor Gomes, Yubin Huh, Heesu Yun and John Trueswell Truth-functional negation poses remarkable challenges to accounts of word learning. When someone utters, “It is not raining,” what information is available from observing the world that leads to such a thought? Whenever it is not raining, the weather is any number of other things (e.g., sunny, snowing), and these are presumably much more available immediately. If early language learners are limited in their inferential abilities and knowledge about the world, it’s unclear how they could learn what “not” means from such cases. We propose that event perception can spontaneously provide a construal of an event to an observer before it is completed, and thus cases of failure could provide strong and reliable evidence of a negative construals through development. When failures are commented upon, they may therefore serve as ideal negator-learning contexts. Our theory was supported by production data showing both children and adults reliable describe failures with negation.	Overcoming performance issues: Children respect presuppositions of “the”-expressions. Yuanfan Ying, Alexander Williams, Valentine Hacquard and Jeffrey Lidz Elicited production studies have suggested that children up to the age of 5 sometimes use singular “the”-expressions in non-adult-like ways, i.e., when the referent is not familiar to interlocutors or not unique in the domain. However, unnatural settings in prior studies may be responsible for children’s production errors. We present a new elicitation-through-conversation study that creates a more natural production setting. By controlling for referent salience and incorporating natural turn-taking, we find that 4-year-olds, just like adults, respect the presuppositions of “the” even in elicited production. They never used definites when intended referents were unfamiliar to the listener; after introducing referents, they mostly used definites to refer to a unique referent and much less so with a non-unique one. This implies, contrary to prior work, that we have little reason to believe that children have the wrong meaning for “the” or lack the pragmatic capacity to use it properly.

3:30 – 5:30
POSTER SESSION I – METCALF SMALL + CONFERENCE AUDITORIUM

5:30 – 7:00

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Sign Language Acquisition is a Human Right

Dr. Diane Lillo-Martin (University of Connecticut)

METCALF LARGE

Abstract

Saturday, November 9th, 2024

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Session A East Balcony	Session B Conference Auditorium	Session C Terrace Lounge
Prosody and perception	Word learning	Social biases and adversity
9:00 – 9:30
Acquiring prosodic cues to word boundaries: Perception and production evidence from Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with cochlear implants. Feng Xu, Ping Tang, Katherine Demuth and Nan Xu Rattanasone Previous studies have established that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with typical hearing (TH) can utilize prosodic cues (duration and pitch) to distinguish compounds (e.g., jellybeans) from lists (e.g., jelly, beans) in both perception and production by age 4. However, preschoolers with cochlear implants (CIs) may face challenges integrating these cues, as CIs do not efficiently encode pitch information. This study examined whether preschoolers with CIs can distinguish compounds from lists in perception (Experiment 1), and whether they can also use these prosodic cues to distinguish them in production (Experiment 2). The results indicated that preschoolers with CIs can identify compounds, and employ longer duration to differentiate compounds from lists; however, they cannot fully utilize pitch cues for disambiguation. These findings suggest that, for preschoolers with CIs, durational cues are more reliably used than pitch cues to meaning.	Blocked vs. interleaved exposure in bilingual children’s novel word learning. Caitlyn Slawny, Emma J. Libersky and Margarita Kaushanskaya Dual-language exposure varies widely within and across bilingual populations. Children may be exposed to two languages in distinct environments, but they also may hear languages alternate within the same. These natural bilingual environments map onto blocked and interleaved exposure conditions that have been extensively studied in developmental and psycholinguistic literature. However, their effects on bilingual word learning have not yet been examined. In two experiments, we investigated whether blocked (Experiment 1) and interleaved exposure (Experiment 2) to two languages would affect bilingual children’s word learning, and if learning would be influenced by language ability. Our findings indicated that Spanish-English bilingual children four- to five-years of age) in both experiments learned novel English and novel Spanish words above chance, with better learning of Spanish novel words in the interleaved vs. the blocked experiment.	Pre-migration adversity and socioemotional wellbeing shape the growth of L2 complex syntax in Syrian refugee children: A longitudinal study. Hannah B. Lam, Johanne Paradis and Adriana Soto Corominas Previous cross-sectional studies found that second language acquisition of vocabulary and morphosyntax for refugee children is affected by pre-migration adversity and socioemotional wellbeing. However, little is known about the extent to which adversity and wellbeing affects refugee children’s production of complex syntax in narratives with more long-term exposure to the second language environment. This longitudinal study of L1-Arabic, L2-English Syrian refugees aged 6-14 over the course of two to five years used the Test of Narrative Language to measure clausal density and mean length of utterance in words in L2-English. Linear mixed effects regression models implicated the roles of increased L2 exposure, age, socioeconomic status, and nonverbal IQ, while additional model variances were explained by time spent in refugee camps and socioemotional factors like prosocial behaviors and hyperactivity. In conclusion, these results highlight the lingering impact of mental health and trauma specific to refugee populations on their bilingual development.
9:30 – 10:00
The influence of phonotactics on morphological decomposition in infancy. Kevin Liang and Megha Sundara Recent research (Kim & Sundara, 2021) has shown that English-learning 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with -s like babs and teeps that are embedded in passages, with just the stem bab and teep, demonstrating an early sensitivity to morphological relatedness. By 6-months, infants are also becoming sensitive to phonotactics. In Experiment 1, we found that 6-month-old English-learning infants relate nonce forms suffixed with the [z] allomorph, which would be phonotactically ill-formed without a morpheme boundary, but not the [s] allomorph of the English -s suffix. In Experiment 2, we found that 6-month-olds only related nonce forms suffixed with [z] when the resulting stem would be phonotactically legal but not when it would be phonotactically illegal. These results show that morpheme decomposition is not obligatory at 6-months; instead, infants’ ability to decompose potentially suffixed words is constrained by their developing knowledge of phonotactic restrictions in English.	Do children use transitional probabilities to learn new words in real life? Evidence from age-of-acquisition trajectories across seven languages. Sophie Regan and Mahesh Srinivasan Segmenting words from continuous speech is a fundamental problem for language acquisition. Infants are believed to overcome this problem in part by tracking the transitional probabilities (TPs) between sounds in a language, since TPs between sounds within words tend to be higher than those which span word boundaries. Classic work demonstrates infants can track TPs and use them to distinguish high-probability and low-probability sequences in both artificial and natural languages in lab settings, but additional work is needed to demonstrate that children actually leverage this information to segment and learn words in their daily lives. The present study fills this gap by exploring whether words containing higher-probability transitions between phonemes are acquired earlier than words containing lower-probability transitions, which would be expected if children actually rely on transitional probabilities to segment speech and learn new words.	The role of processing time and accuracy in children’s accent-related biases. Ajna F. Kertesz and Catharine Echols Both adults and children show accent-related biases typically favoring native speakers over foreign-accented speakers. These biases are sometimes attributed to social group membership-signaling properties of accents. However, another less explored explanation is that the cognitive difficulty of processing accented speech leads to negative affect, which then results in negative social judgments. In our study we examined both processing time and social preference of accented speech in 3–6-year-old children. We used three different accents, American English (US), New Zealand English (NZ), Turkish-accented English (TR), to explore both the native and the familiar properties of accent that may influence processing and social preferences. Preliminary GLMMs (N= 59/80) revealed that faster reaction time and higher accuracy were good predictors of higher social judgments (e.g., nice). These results suggest that processing accented speech is cognitively taxing and this difficulty may partially explain social biases towards accented people.
10:00 – 10:30
English vowel perception in Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers: Multiple-talker input is only beneficial for children with high language exposure levels. Simona Montanari, Jeremy Steffman and Robert Mayr Despite extensive work on perceptual development in bilingual infants, little is known about speech perception in bilingual preschoolers. This study investigates English vowel perception in Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers. Perception was assessed through a forced-choice minimal-pair identification task in which children heard synthesized stimuli that varied systematically along the /i-ɪ/ continuum and had to match them with one of two pictures. The results of Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analyses revealed that bilinguals produced vowel perception patterns with no credible difference from those of monolinguals. While age did not predict perception, input quantity and diversity jointly interacted to moderate how well bilinguals perceived the /i-ɪ/ contrast, with diverse input promoting perceptual performance in children with high English exposure and more advanced English language skills, while limiting performance in children with more limited English exposure. This suggests that varied input can be more or less beneficial based on the learner’s language learning stage.	Contending with label variation in early word learning. Kennedy Casey and Casey Lew-Williams Child-directed speech contains many unique words that are not typically heard in adult-adult conversation, such as tummy, booksie, and diapey. If word learning is conceptualized mainly as a one-to-one mapping problem, then this type of label variation could be viewed as unhelpful noise that obscures the learning signal. However, we present evidence that label variation is a key feature of (North American English) word learning environments and should be incorporated into theories of early word learning. In Study 1, analyses of home recordings of child-caregiver interaction reveal that earlier-learned English words tend to have more label variation. In Study 2, we show that English-hearing toddlers successfully learn novel word-object mappings under not only stable but also variable labeling conditions. Together, our results suggest that label variation does not hinder (and instead seems to support) word learning. Discussion will focus on various competing explanations for this pattern of findings.	Does grammatical gender influence implicit gender attitudes? Evidence from sequential bi/multilingual speakers from Afghanistan. Ali Shahidy and Usha Lakshmanan (presented remotely) The current research explores the link between language and cognition, focusing on the impact of grammatical gender on implicit gender-attitudes, an issue not hitherto addressed. Adult Afghans (N=101) comprising native-speakers of Dari (a genderless language; N=59) or Pashto (a grammatical gender language; N=42) completed an on-line background questionnaire, religiosity scale, and the Gender-Career Implicit Association Test (IAT), in their L1. Multiple regression revealed that Model 2, with L1 Gender-type (Pashto=1, Dari=0), improved Model 1 (comprising Age, Sex, and Religiosity). L1 gender-type was the most significant predictor. Contrary to our prediction, speakers of Dari and not of Pashto had significantly higher implicit gender bias. Model 3, adding L2 Genderless-Type (Dari=1, Other=0), improved the model further, with L1 Gender-type as the most and L2 Genderless-Type as the second-most significant predictor. Model 4, adding L2-natural gender-type (English=1, Other=0), slightly reduced the total variance explained. Implications from a conceptual and methodological perspective are discussed.

10:30 – 11:00
BREAK

Session A East Balcony	Session B Conference Auditorium	Session C Terrace Lounge
Statistical learning: new directions	Pragmatics	Spatial language
11:00 – 11:30
Characterizing language learning trajectories with optimal transport. Nathalie Fernandez, Rose Griffin, Patrick Shafto and Naomi Feldman Children are often characterized as learning language efficiently from remarkably little data. We formalize the idea of efficient learning using optimal transport, an area of mathematics that formalizes how to efficiently move between probability distributions, through a case study on determiner acquisition. To apply optimal transport to language acquisition, we characterize language as a distribution over linguistic features and measure the child’s movement toward the caregiver’s distribution. Specifically, we characterize a speaker’s determiner production as a multinomial distribution, where its use could take one of three events: omitting the required determiner, producing a definite article (the), or producing an indefinite article (a or an). Contrary to the predictions of previous theories, results showed that the child moved toward the caregiver’s distribution, but the trajectory veered strongly in the direction of the indefinite determiner, relative to the parent’s distribution, before moving back toward producing the definite determiner.	Children’s integration of communal lexicons in communication: Evidence from Hindu and Muslim children in India. Marina Ortega-Andres, Sophie Regan, Hugh Rabagliati and Mahesh Srinivasan (presented remotely) To successfully communicate, adults rely on their expectations of interlocutors’ linguistic knowledge, which are influenced by their interlocutor’s communities and communal lexicons (Clark, 1996). For example, a birdwatcher might use nomenclature like “nuthatch” when conversing with other birdwatchers, but opt for more general terms like “bird” with others. Research finds that children can adapt their word-choices based on their interlocutor’s knowledge (O’Neill, 1996), but few studies have investigated whether children integrate knowledge of their interlocutor’s communities. We explored this across two studies with Hindu and Muslim children in Gujarat, India, who have distinct communal lexicons (Table 1). We examined children’s understanding of these communal lexicons (Study 1) and how they integrate this knowledge in intergroup communication (Study 2). We were particularly interested in potential dominance differences, given that Muslims are a minority in India.	Who’s right about whose ‘right’? The understanding of perspective-dependent spatial language by older autistic children. Emily Zane, Anil Ramakrishna, Julia Mertens, Shrikanth Narayanan and Ruth Grossman The current project tested projective-preposition (e.g., left/right/front/behind) comprehension by 17 autistic and 18 non-autistic teenagers who scored similarly on standardized language and IQ measures. During the task, participants had to accurately interpret prepositional phrases to select a targeted referent. Prepositional phrases randomly alternated from using the participant’s frame of reference (‘the one on your left’) or another person’s (‘…my left’). While all participants performed well on the task (average accuracy rates above 90% in both groups), autistic participants were significantly less successful at identifying the correct shape when preposition phrases used the other person’s frame of reference. This finding may reveal subtle difficulties interpreting language that depends on visuospatial-perspective-taking in autism. Such a hypothesis has been offered to explain differences in the development of various language forms in younger autistic children, like first-/second-person pronouns and other deictic forms.
11:30 – 12:00
LMs are not good proxies for human language learners. Sathvik Nair, Katherine Howitt, Allison Dods and Robert Hopkins We look for a shared underlying representation of diverse surface forms of filler-gap dependencies (FGDs) that could be exploited for learning. We test a large language model (LM), explicitly controlling its input, to uncover whether it posits such a generalization. Recent successes of LMs call into question what aspects of linguistic theory are necessary for acquiring language: they can generate natural language and determine relative acceptability of sentence strings. Some researchers argue these successes replace syntactic theory in explaining how children arrive at a grammar. We show that while LMs have limited success differentiating grammatical from ungrammatical FGDs (Table 1), they rely on specific properties of the input, rather than making a human-like generalization across FGDs. Our work reiterates the importance of constrained hypothesis spaces for acquiring human-like structural generalizations and reflects on the limited potential of LMs, which lack specific linguistic biases, to model language acquisition.	“Let’s call this a dax!” Children and adults consider speaker knowledge when reasoning about novel labels Khuyen Nha Le and David Barner Children typically compute a “mutual exclusivity inference” when encountering a new word, excluding known referents to infer the word refers to something unfamiliar. One account suggests children consider speaker knowledge to make these inferences, reasoning that an informative speaker wouldn’t use a new word for a known object. Others suggest children make these inferences egocentrically, relying on their own knowledge. Previous research found that children and adults often disregard speaker knowledge when making mutual exclusivity inferences, but may have underestimated epistemic reasoning. In a modified paradigm that made speaker knowledge explicit, adults and older children were more likely to choose randomly between objects when one had an invented label, compared to when its label was taught. Moreover, those believing the speaker knew the label were less likely to choose the labeled object. These findings suggest adults and older children reason about speakers’ knowledge beyond their own when considering novel labels.	Incremental processing of spatial prepositions supports predictions of object geometries. Zoe Ovans, Barbara Landau, Heesu Yun, Sarah Yi and John Trueswell An extensive literature shows that children use their developing linguistic knowledge to process speech incrementally and predict reference to objects. We extend this to the domain of spatial prepositions: these terms appear early in children’s spontaneous speech, yet it can take years to fully grasp their meanings, even for simple spatial terms like “in” and “on.” In Experiment 1, we replicate findings of prediction in adults and extend them to 4-year-olds, showing that both groups use ‘inside’ to predict reference to containers. In Experiment 2, we further ask about the specificity of these predictions. We found that when adults heard basic locative clauses, they looked to images depicting canonical spatial relationships, but when given additional nonce verbs, they looked to images depicting less-canonical relations. Together, these findings show that adults and children use spatial prepositions to restrict reference, looking predictively to objects that afford specific geometric properties in real time.
12:00 – 12:30
The challenge of phonological variation in infant-directed speech for models of statistical word segmentation. Caroline Beech and Daniel Swingley Words are not always pronounced the same way, even by a single talker. Statistical models of infant word segmentation normally ignore this variation. How costly is this oversight? Testing on adult-adult conversation (Buckeye Corpus) showed that variability hurts model performance significantly, and causes serious problems for lexicon building, because phonological variants overlap enormously with separate, similar-sounding words (Beech & Swingley, 2023). Here we find that infant-directed speech (IDS) does not mitigate these problems. IDS (Brent Corpus) and ADS (Buckeye) showed a similar decrease in segmentation performance moving from dictionary pronunciations to actual, transcribed pronunciations. Additionally, network analysis of IDS revealed similar levels of entanglement between segmented forms and lexical items, with 50% of segmented forms trapped in a dense web of phonological and lexical overlaps where phonological identities/differences were not consistent cues to word identity. The results raise doubts about prior optimism concerning the utility of statistical segmentation heuristics.	4- and 5-year-olds integrate verb knowledge with situation models in online reference resolution. Yukun Yu, Amanda Rose Yuile, Damian Ishak and Cynthia Fisher Children and adults use multiple information sources to anticipate referents in language comprehension, including lexical semantics and event-specific situation models. Adults also integrate verb meanings with situation models (Chambers & San Juan, 2008): For example, they anticipated previously-moved objects upon hearing “return”. Building on this work, we asked whether children integrate verb meanings with situation models to generate referential predictions. In a visual-world task, 4- and 5-year-olds viewed images and listened to stories describing transfer events. The critical sentences contained “give back” or “give”, which impose differing constraints on possible recipients: “give back”, but not “give”, implies a previous owner of the object. Children looked more toward the previous owner when hearing “give back” compared to “give”, indicating they integrated the presuppositions of “give back” with their knowledge of the story. Thus, during online comprehension, children selectively deploy event-specific situation knowledge, based on verb semantics, to anticipate upcoming referents.	The role of spatial layout and language in infants’ categorization of places. Yi Lin, Agata Bochynska, Daniel D. Dilks and Moira R. Dillon Infants engage with objects early and frequently hear them labeled, but infants do not independently navigate places until later and rarely hear place nouns. Do 6- and 12-month-old infants nevertheless use shape and language to categorize places like they do to categorize objects? Across six preregistered experiments, 164 full-term English-learning infants participated in a novelty-preference looking-time paradigm. Experiments 1–3 showed that 6-month-olds could categorize dynamic scenes with open spatial layouts versus closed spatial layouts, even when the scenes were grid-scrambled, but not when there was no accompanying labeling language. 12-month-olds in Experiments 4–6, by contrast, could categorize scenes under all of these conditions. While language supports early place categorization, this changes by the end of the first year of life, and category-specific shape information, like a place’s spatial layout, is not required. The present work expands our understanding of infants’ intuitions about space and language across domains.

12:30 – 1:30

LUNCH BREAK

POP-UP MENTORING PROGRAM (PUMP) (METCALF LARGE)

Session A East Balcony	Session B Conference Auditorium	Session C Terrace Lounge
Development in diverse contexts	Word learning	Syntax
1:30 – 2:00
Bilingualism effects in expressive vocabulary development in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from longitudinal data. Eleni Peristeri, Ioannis Vogindroukas and Ianthi Maria Tsimpli (presented remotely) One aspect of language which has been little researched in autistic children concerns vocabulary development. Cross-sectional research found that autistic children’s lexical errors may be traced to weak central coherence that enhances attention to detail. Evidence has shown that bilingualism mitigates autistic children’s detail-focused processing style. Here, we focus on bilingual and monolingual autistic children’s longitudinal picture-naming performance, and a classification of lexical errors in terms of semantic and visual criteria, to test whether monolingual and bilingual autistic children follow diverging developmental trajectories of expressive vocabulary. According to the findings, expressive vocabulary growth patterns showed a delay for bilingual (vs. monolingual) children at younger ages (ages 8 and 10), followed by a sudden “catch-up” burst at the age of 12. Bilinguals produced fewer visual and detail-focused naming errors than monolinguals, implying that bilingualism may work as a protective factor against autistic children’s weak central coherence and low-level visual processing style.	Tense morphology can guide real-time interpretation of novel verbs in young children. Leticia Schiavon Kolberg, Mayara de Sa Pinto, Giulio Massari, Clara Dargent, Anne Caroline Fievet and Alex de Carvalho This study investigated children’s use of present and future tense morphology to guide verb learning. French-learning 3-to-4-year-olds listened to novel verbs presented in either the present (e.g. “the girl is raning!”) or future tense (e.g. “the girl will rane!”), while watching a video displaying two characters side-by-side: one performing an ongoing novel action, and another performing a future novel action. Afterwards, participants saw images representing different characters performing these actions, and were asked to choose another instance of the novel event. Eye-movements revealed that children in the present tense condition looked significantly more at the ongoing novel action than children in the future condition. Pointing data showed that participants successfully extended the meaning of the novel verb to a different instance of the novel action. These findings indicate that young children can employ verb tense morphology in real-time to infer temporal aspects of verb meanings.	Testing error-driven learning accounts for the dative alternation in native speakers and learners of Mandarin. Yanxin (Alice) Zhu and Theres Grüter This study examines error-driven learning (EDL) accounts for the dative alternation in native speakers (L1ers) and classroom learners (CLs) of Mandarin. We ask whether Mandarin users predict upcoming dative constructions based on verb constraints (RQ1), and adjust their real-time prediction (RQ2a) and production (RQ2b) when only primed with DO datives despite a strong general PO bias for the Mandarin dative alternation. Participants completed a standard visual world eye tracking (VWP) task to examine RQ1, followed by a visual-world + structural priming task (VWSP) to examine RQ2a. They also completed sentence completion tasks one day before and after VWSP to examine RQ2b. Results from VWP support the key underlying assumption of EDL for the dative alternation—active prediction based on verb constraints, among both L1ers and CLs. In VWSP, however, we observed no robust effects or adaptation of prediction in real-time, yet both groups showed longer-term adaptation in production.
2:00 – 2:30
Are characteristics of late talker vocabularies unique to spoken languages?. Elana Pontecorvo, Amelia A. Becker, Amy Lieberman, Jennie Pyers and Naomi Caselli Research on “late talkers,” children under two with small productive vocabularies in the absence of other delays, has exclusively focused on children learning a spoken language, so little is known about deaf children with early sign language exposure who nevertheless have small early vocabularies (called here “late signers”). We asked whether late signers’ (N=46) sensitivity to lexical properties differed from younger, vocabulary-size matched participants. A mixed-effects logistic regressions predicting sign acquisition showed significant interactions between group and frequency, as well as group and iconicity, such that the positive effect of each was weaker for those in the “Late Signer” group. These results suggest that the mechanisms of vocabulary acquisition are different for signers with late emerging vocabularies than those with earlier emerging vocabularies indicating that the cognitive underpinnings of late talking are not specific to the spoken modality.	Environmental context scaffolds children’s semantic representations of novel words. Elise Breitfeld and Jenny Saffran Young children rapidly acquire rich semantic knowledge about nouns—what category they belong to, what actions they are associated with, etc. This study explores whether the environmental context in which children encounter novel objects and their labels might influence how children ascribe meaning to novel nouns. Children (36-48 months) were taught labels for novel objects presented in natural scenes (kitchen or outdoor). They were then tested on their semantic representation of each of these novel labels using a verb-mediated prediction task in a looking-while-listening paradigm. Specifically, we examined whether children predicted which target referent would be named after hearing a context-relevant verb (i.e., “eat” for kitchen objects and “throw” for outdoor objects), but prior to hearing the actual label. Results showed that children did make these predictions, suggesting that they encoded environmental context information during word learning and used it to inform their understanding of novel word meanings.	Interfaces in ambiguity resolution of wh-elements by L1-Russian L2-Chinese speakers: A case study of na-construction Xin Yan and Shanshan Yan This study examines how adult native Russian speakers learning Chinese resolve ambiguities in Chinese wh-elements, focusing on the prosody-semantics and syntax-semantics interfaces. Chinese wh-elements can be ambiguous between interrogative and existential readings, resolved by prosodic contours and syntactic positioning. In Russian, such elements are unambiguously interrogative. The study involved 28 learners (divided by proficiency) and 31 native speakers, using acceptability judgment and listening comprehension tasks. Results indicate that learners continue to face challenges with syntactic cues up to the advanced stage, while prosodic cues are acquired earlier. Persistent differences with native speakers are likely due to the complex lexical mapping between L1 and L2.
2:30 – 3:00
A 5-Year Longitudinal Study of Bilinguals’ Vocabulary Growth and the Role of the Pre-kindergarten Home Language and Literacy Environments. Johana Chaparro Moreno This study examined the development of English vocabulary among Spanish-speaking dual language learners (DLLs) from pre-kindergarten (pre-K) to 3rd grade and the influence of the pre-K home language and literacy environments. Participants were 285 DLLs –96% Hispanic and 46% female– living in the U.S. The major gains and individual differences in English vocabulary occurred from pre-K to kindergarten. Caregivers’ English proficiency and DLLs’ amount of language use were significant predictors, and the link between the latter and DLLs’ English vocabulary was in general not linear. In a language-use continuum from only Spanish to mostly English, the major change occurred between mostly Spanish and Spanish and English equal amounts. Home literacy variables were not significant predictors, yet the Spanish and English equal amounts group tended to live in households with relatively more literacy practices and resources and had caregivers with more English proficiency.	Word order, morphological typology, and method predict the size of the noun bias: A meta-analysis. Yiqun Zhang, Marisa Casillas and Subin Kim Across diverse language settings, concrete nouns predominate in children’s early vocabularies, known as the “noun bias,” attributed to a conceptual advantage for concrete objects (Gentner, 1982). While many studies report a noun bias, some find no bias or even a verb bias, with significant variation between languages. Methodological approaches also affect the size of the bias. This meta-analysis synthesizes evidence from 96 empirical papers spanning 28 languages over 50 years. We examined the effect size of the noun bias, considering factors like basic word order and morphosyntactic type. Results show that method and morphology are key predictors of the bias size, with observational studies showing less noun bias compared to checklist studies. Languages with verb-initial word order and analytic typology display greater noun bias. These findings highlight the complex interplay of linguistic context and method, emphasizing the need for diverse developmental data to better understand vocabulary development.	Bilingualism, Working Memory, and Relative Clause Comprehension in Children. Ehsan Solaimani, Vicky Chondrogianni, Anamaria Bentea, Hélène Delage, Pauline Wolfer, Franziska Baumeister and Stephanie Durrleman (presented remotely) This study explores how working memory (WM) impacts comprehension of subject (SRCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs) in monolingual and bilingual children. By comparing French and German, we test two accounts: hierarchical intervention, predicting different WM costs for SRCs and ORCs across languages, and linear distance, predicting cross-linguistic asymmetries. We administered a character-selection task to 3-to-11-year-olds, assessing RC comprehension and WM via non-word repetition. Results showed higher accuracy for SRCs in both languages, but only French showed significant WM effects. No WM effects were observed in German, suggesting that case-marking may alleviate reliance on WM. Bilingual children in French used WM more efficiently, enhancing comprehension of both RC types. This indicates that bilingualism might improve WM utilization in language tasks. We argue that neither hierarchical nor linear account fully captures the patterns with WM. Results underscore the importance of cross-linguistic research to understand the interplay between bilingualism, WM, and syntax.
3:00 – 3:30
Having, accessing, and uptaking for syntactic representation: Structural priming in diverse child populations. Jiuzhou Hao, Patrick Sturt, Jason Rothman and Vicky Chondrogianni The present study adopted the structural priming paradigm to examine the existence, accessibility and uptake of syntactic representations (of three Mandarin non-canonical structures) in Mandarin-speaking monolingual children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (Mono-TD and Mono-DLD) and Mandarin-English child heritage speakers with typical development (CHS-TD). Mono-DLD has reduced uptake while CHS-TD has reduced input quantity. Mono-DLD and TD bilingual children sometimes show surface overlap. Priming allows us to examine if the similarities are at the level of representation (the existence of priming) or performance (the magnitude of priming) and if reduced input leads to reduced uptake (cumulative priming). The results showed that priming surfaced in all groups but was smaller in Mono-DLD and cumulative priming was found in both TD groups but not Mono-DLD. These suggest that all groups had the syntactic representations which Mono-DLD had more difficulties accessing and uptaking. Reduced input does not necessarily lead to reduced uptake.	Tseltal children show a verb bias in early vocabulary development. Marisa Casillas, Ruthe Foushee and Kennedy Casey It is well-documented across various languages that children acquire nouns more easily and earlier than other types of words, a phenomenon known as the noun bias. However, in Tseltal, the structural features of the language, as well as child–caregiver interactional patterns, dampen the salience of nouns and heighten the salience of verbs. This leads us to predict a diminished noun bias and a predominance of verbs in Tseltal children’s early vocabularies. To test this hypothesis, we developed a Tseltal vocabulary checklist containing 262 items and conducted expressive vocabulary interviews with 78 parents of Tseltal-acquiring children aged 9–23 months. The results indicated an absence of noun bias and revealed a clear verb bias in Tseltal children’s spontaneous speech. Adjectives and closed-class words showed the common under-representation pattern. Echoing past cross-cultural research in this domain, our findings suggest that early lexical development is influenced by linguistic and cultural factors.	Noun phrase type and information status in relative clause processing. Silke Brandt, Anna Theakston and Jacky Chan We conducted an eye-tracking study with a picture-selection task with English-speaking monolingual 3-year-olds (N = 48), 5-year-olds (N = 48), and adult controls (N = 48). Participants heard a subject or object relative clause (SRC/ORC). The embedded NP was either expressed by a pronoun or lexical NP (SRC: Where is the chicken that is kissing THE MOUSE/HIM; ORC: Where is the chicken that THE MOUSE/HE is kissing). In addition, the embedded NP was either discourse-given or new. Accuracy and response-time data suggest that ORCs were generally more difficult to process than SRCs. The processing asymmetry increased when the embedded NP was expressed by a pronoun. Information status of the embedded NP was not a significant main factor. However, response-time data for the 5-year-olds and adults indicate that when pronouns referred to discourse-given referents, processing became easier. As children get older, they become sensitive to links between discourse-level and lexical cues.

3:30 – 5:30
POSTER SESSION II – METCALF SMALL + CONFERENCE AUDITORIUM

5:30 – 7:00
Awards and Recognition: Jean Berko Gleason Award, Diversity Travel Fellowships, and Paula Menyuk Awards METCALF LARGE PLENARY ADDRESS: A Lifespan Perspective on Heritage Language Development Dr. Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) METCALF LARGE Abstract A heritage language is a socio-politically minority and/or minoritized language acquired as a first or one of the first languages in a bilingual or multilingual context. When heritage speakers acquire their native language under conditions of reduced exposure and use during late childhood and adolescence, very often their heritage language does not fully develop; it displays reduced vocabulary and structural differences and variability at all levels of linguistic analysis that arise from the complex interaction between the nature and quantity of input and the age of bilinguals. In the last two decades, and with the growing realization that our theoretical models must make room for variation in language experiences and different types of speakers, the acquisition of heritage languages has grown into an important subfield in linguistics, language development and applied linguistics. In this talk, I will refer to recent experimental results from behavioral studies of different languages to show how the development of heritage languages 1) sheds light on critical differences between first and second language acquisition and the notion of a native speaker, 2) elucidates the nature of language loss as a function of age, and 3) provides insights on the extent to which a native language that was not fully acquired in childhood can be regained later in life. The relevance and implications of the study of heritage languages for heritage speakers and their families, for bilingualism and society, and for the language and cognitive sciences will be discussed.
7:00 – 8:30
RECEPTION– ZISKIND LOUNGE

Sunday, November 10th, 2024

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Session A East Balcony	Session B Conference Auditorium	Session C Terrace Lounge
Online lexical processing	Syntax in homesign and L2 populations	Syntax semantics interface
9:00 – 9:30
Effects of L1 attrition on predictive processing in Japanese. Theres Grüter and Sachiko Roos This study examines the role of language experience on predictive processing by investigating to what extent predictive processing in the L1 is modulated by immersion in an L2 environment. 58 monolingually raised adult Japanese speakers with varying length-of-residence (LoR) in the U.S. completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment testing predictive use of prenominal classifiers (replicating Mitsugi, 2018) and case-marking (replicating Kamide et al., 2003). Findings show a robust main effect of condition (different/same) for classifiers, with no modulation by LoR. The main effect of condition (accusative/dative) for case-marking, however, was significantly modulated by LoR, with the effect no longer robust among those with LoR ≥ 10 years. This differential pattern is reminiscent of findings from adult L2 learners of Japanese (Mitsugi, 2018; Mitsugi & MacWhinney, 2016), suggesting cues used more robustly in L2 processing may also be those that are more resilient to attrition in the L1.	Who did what to whom? Marking event participants in Nicaraguan homesign systems. Annemarie Kocab, Madeline Quam, Marie Coppola and Jesse Snedeker Two strong hypotheses bridge between typological studies of the frequency of different marking patterns and psychological studies of how these patterns are acquired. The word-order hypothesis proposes that order is a cognitively-salient cue, available to children before linguistic cues and thus appears early in language emergence. The agent-first hypothesis proposes that agents hold a privileged role in event representations and shape emerging languages. A recent study of Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN) found no preference for consistent or agent-initial word order. Instead LSN-signers used other linguistic devices. We looked at homesigners, each repersenting a different origin point for language emergence. We found no support for the agent-first hypothesis: most homesigners produced more patient-initial responses than agent-initial responses. We found no support for the word-order hypothesis: only one homesigner produced the same order on more than half the trials. Instead homesigners used a variety of other devices for marking participant roles.	Pragmatic factors facilitating children’s universal quantification: Evidence from child Turkish. Munir Ozturhan and Utako Minai This study explores Turkish-speaking children’s universal quantification, by examining two pragmatic factors which may reduce their quantifier spreading (q-spreading), erroneous rejection of universally-quantified statements like “Every child is carrying a box” when there is a box nobody is carrying as well as box-carrying children. Experiment 1 examined a Turkish-specific grammatical factor involving the focus-marking question particle mI. When mI is attached to the quantified-subject, conveying the “It is every child that is carrying a box” interpretation, children gave more adult-like responses, revealing the effect of focus marking helping them avoid q-spreading. Experiment 2 examined a discourse factor, manipulating the Question Under Discussion in the experimental discourse; children provided more adult-like responses when the quantification was clearly presented as the topic at hand. Our findings confirm children’s successful universal quantification with pragmatic support, serving as the first to reveal the role of a language-specific grammatical factor (focus marking) facilitating children’s quantification.
9:30 – 10:00
Emerging Phonological and Semantic Specificity in Infant’s Lexical Processing. Erin E. Campbell, Lillianna Righter and Elika Bergelson Despite many experiments reporting effects of mispronunciation and semantic relatedness effects during lexical processing, the developmental timeline of infants’ phonological and semantic specificity remains unclear. In two pre-registered, cross-sectional looking-while-listening experiments, we test the developmental timeline of children’s phonological and semantic specificity in 9-24 month-olds (n=80; data collection ongoing). We hold the familiar-word stimuli constant across experiments and across a wide age range, allowing for precise control of tested lexical items. Based on initial analyses, in the Semantic Similarity Experiment we find an age effect but no trial-type effect: children did not show an overall influence of semantic relatedness in their target looking. In contrast, for the Mispronunciation Experiment we find both an age and trial-type effect, with preliminary support for this effect increasing with age. Implications for meaning- and form-based refinement over years one and two are discussed.	Structure flexibility in description of transitive events among native and late CSL signers. Yuting Zhang, Hao Lin and Qi Cheng This study investigates the consequences of language deprivation on the acquisition of spatial devices and structure flexibility in Chinese Sign Language (CSL) adult late signers. Using a scene description task with manipulated visual arrangements and animacy levels, we elicited more non-canonical utterances from 10 native and 12 late CSL signers. While agent-patient relative order was still dominant, right-positioned agents elicited more patient-first structures (native: 37.2%; late: 26.5%), as compared to left-positioned agents (native: 34.1%; late: 14.0%). However, native signers used significantly more agreement markers (AM) in patient-first structures (88.6%, N=123) than late signers (28.2%, N=78), Χ²= 66.832, p <.001. Native signers exhibit flexible word order modulated by spatial markers, while late signers struggle with using spatial markings consistently and accurately. These findings support the selective impact of delayed L1 acquisition, with complex structures involving spatial devices being more heavily influenced in late CSL signers.	Conditionally Literal: Exploring Conditional Reasoning in Children Ebru Evcen and David Barner Understanding conditional inferences is fundamental to human reasoning, allowing us to predict the consequences of actions. For instance, the conditional “If you tidy your toys, you’ll get a reward” can be interpreted literally, meaning tidying toys is one way to get a reward, or pragmatically, implying it is the only way. Past studies show school-aged children (ages 7-12) struggle to arrive at literal meanings but, interestingly, compute adult-like, pragmatic interpretations at this age.One important limitation of past research is it hasn’t tested cases where literal meanings are contextually appropriate. Here we tested scenarios with both literal and pragmatic meanings, as well as those with only the literal meaning is felicitous. We tested 106 children (ages 4-6) and found that preschoolers are adult-like in computing literal meanings of conditionals when contextually supported, and also can arrive at pragmatic meanings of conditionals. These findings inform theories of logical reasoning and implicature acquisition.
10:00 – 10:30
I spy with my little eye: Comparing different online word comprehension measures in infancy. Andrea Sander-Montant, Laia Fibla and Krista Byers-Heinlein The looking-while-listening (LWL) procedure is a popular way to measure infant word comprehension. Despite its popularity, it is unknown whether the various performance measures derived from LWL index the same construct or which are most robust. This study compares 11 LWL measures across five datasets of French–English bilingual children (ages 14–48 months). Pearson correlations and factor analyses allowed us to identify two robust factors related to whether the child initially looked at the target or distractor at the start of the trial. Some measures, like proportion looking to target, were informative across both trial types, while others were only informative for target- or distractor-initial trials. Linear models revealed that measures such as proportion looking to target were more closely related to performance predictors: age and language exposure, than other measures. These findings suggest that LWL measures’ interpretability depends on LWL procedural factors, which might impact recommendations for best research practices.	Does chicken come before egg? Investigating word order sensitivity in L2 Chinese binomial processing. Xiaolong Lu and Jue Wang Word order is crucial for sentence and multiword expression processing, such as binomials, where two words of the same category are conjoined (e.g., chicken and egg). Despite their semantic compositionality and structural flexibility (Carroll & Conklin, 2020), binomials tend to follow a preferred order, making them ideal for studying L2 learners’ word order sensitivity during processing (Altamimi & Conklin, 2024). We investigated binomial processing in L2 Chinese, considering binomial semantics (concreteness) and linguistic context. Our results from two online tasks indicate that L2 learners failed to exhibit sensitivity to word order variation in binomials with and without linguistic context, despite showing native-like word order preference in an offline task. Their word order (in)sensitivity does not differ between concrete and abstract binomials. Our finding suggests a different processing pattern for binomials as a type of formulaic expression. Additionally, L2 language processing patterns may not fully align with learners’ language experience.	Children’s difficulty comprehending ‘but’ is linked to revision. Elizabeth Swanson, Ana Antonio and Alex de Carvalho Children have been found to struggle with interpreting the connective ‘but’ before age seven. However, we provide new evidence that their difficulty is not merely due to a misinterpretation of ‘but’ itself, but rather involves difficulty with revising their initial expectations. In two experiments, we examined French-speaking 6-to-9-year-olds’s interpretations of novel words in sentences containing ‘alors’ (‘so’) or ‘mais’ (‘but’), e.g., “Lea wanted to heat up her food, [so/but] she put it in the rane.” By varying whether the final interpretation of the novel word required revising the expectations created by the initial clause, we found that children successfully interpreted both ‘so’ and ‘but’ in sentences that did not require revision, but they failed in sentences requiring revision. Regardless of connective type, even by age nine, children struggled to regulate revision. We discuss possible factors contributing to variation in children’s success, including the effect of socioeconomic status.
10:30 – 11:00
Evidence for top-down constraints and form-based prediction in 4–5 year-olds’ lexical processing. Margaret Kandel, Nan Li and Jesse C. Snedeker We investigated whether children use top-down information to guide lexical processing by conducting a visual-world experiment with 4–5 year-olds and adults. We assessed the extent to which the phonemic cohort effect is modulated by sentence context, reflecting integration of top-down cues into bottom-up phonological processing. We observed cohort competition when target words were in neutral contexts but not when they were in highly constraining contexts. This modulation was equally strong in adults and children. Our results suggest that young children, like adults, can use top-down contextual cues to rule out semantically-incongruent candidates as they hear words unfold. Furthermore, in the high-constraint sentences, we found evidence that children pre-activated the form of the target words before they appeared in the sentences, suggesting that they also use context to predict upcoming words. We discuss how to integrate these findings with previous studies showing that children are less apt to use top-down constraints.	Plurality in L2-English production. Tania Ionin, Amy Yuiko Atiles, Chae Eun Lee and Mien-Jen Wu Second language learners have difficulty with inflectional morphology; while most research has focused on verbal L2 morphology, we explore how L1-Mandarin L2-English learners perform with nominal plural marking in time-pressured production, given that plural marking is ungrammatical with [-human] nouns in Mandarin. We contrast the predictions of the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis (MCH, Jiang 2007) and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH, Lardiere 2009). We report on the results of two studies: written production (Authors, 2022) and oral production (new study), which used identical picture-based materials, and elicited plural marking both with and without lexical cues to plurality. Learners performed with high accuracy across modalities, and improved with proficiency; both learners and native-speaker controls exhibited the least accuracy in the absence of any lexical cues to plurality. These results go against the MCH and are consistent with the FRH, showing that feature reassembly is possible.	The acquisition of the quantification function of Chinese classifiers: An eye-tracking study of young Mandarin-speaking children. Yunqi He, Aijun Huang, Likan Zhan and Fuyun Wu Singularity and unification are two semantic dimensions of the quantification function of Chinese classifiers, which is to define a specific unit of measurement . This study explored the acquisition of the quantification function of individual classifier “个” (ge) and five container classifiers (“碗” (wan, bowl), “盒” (he, box), “盘” (pan, plate), “袋” (dai, bag), and “盆” (pen, basin)) in Mandarin-speaking children aged three to six using an eye-tracking paradigm. We found that sensitivity to classifiers’ singularity and unification increases with age. The acquisition of individual classifiers precedes that of container classifiers, and the development of singularity and unification understanding is relatively independent. Additionally, that mastery of the Chinese numeral “一” (yi, one) is not a prerequisite for quantification function acquisition. Our findings contribute to understanding the developmental trajectory of classifier acquisition in Chinese children.

11:00 – 11:30
BREAK

11:30 – 1:00
SYMPOSIUM
Language Models and Language Acquisition Virginia Valian, Qihui (Amber) Xu, Xiaomeng (Amy) Ma, Judit Gervain, Ruolan Leslie Famularo, and Naomi Feldman METCALF LARGE
1:00 – 1:15
Conference Closing METCALF LARGE

Friday Posters (Session I)

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Group 1: Case and Processing

Knowledge of Morphological Case in Adult Heritage Western Armenian - Annika Topelian and Acrisio Pires

Heritage children's real-time processing of case marking cues in which-questions: Evidence from a cross-national eye-tracking study on heritage Greek in the UK and the US - Vicky Chondrogianni, Jiuzhou Hao, Aikaterini Pantoula and Richard Schwarttz

Predictive use of case marking in (non)canonical sentences in Czech children - Filip Smolík and Jolana Treichelová

Group 2: Computational Modeling

Distributional Learning of Syntactic Islands - Julie Anne Legate and Charles Yang

Semantic Training Signals Promote Hierarchical Syntactic Generalization in Neural Networks - Aditya Yedetore and Najoung Kim

Rage Against the Machine: Comparing Human and Model Performance with Adjective Learning - Megan K. Gotowski and Forrest Davis

Group 3: Developmental Neurolinguistics

Proficiency effects in addition to age effects on ERPs for gender agreement processing in French children - Gabrielle Manning, Guillaume Blais, Judicaël Ludwig Fassaya, John E. Drury, Karsten Steinhauer and Phaedra Royle

Neuroplasticity for phonological awareness in deaf children - Melody Faith Schwenk and Bradley White

Clause-edge Re-representations of Wh-fillers Across Native and Nonnative Speakers: Evidence From γ-band Oscillations - Laurent Dekydtspotter, Kate Miller, Michael Iverson, Jih-ho Cha, Jane Gilbert, Kent Meiner, Ludan Yang and Hongyu Zhang

Group 4: Discourse & Syntax

The influence of discourse context on children's use of conversational devices - Cynthia L. Boo and Letitia Naigles

The Influence of Information Structure on Children's Production of Adverbial Clauses - Shijie Zhang, Silke Brandt and Anna Theakston

The development of German children's production of polite linguistic forms from age 12 months to 8 years - Elizabeth M. Kolln and Jennie Pyers

On another topic, how do acquisition orders vary? The left periphery and topicalisation in bilingual and monolingual acquisition - Núria Bosch and Theresa Biberauer

Group 5: Eye-Tracking

Validating iCatcher+: Automated Gaze Coding for Infant Research - Leah Simon, Elena Luchkina and Sandra R. Waxman

Automatic detection of the visual gaze components of joint attention in observational, naturalistic child language acquisition data - Miranda Dickerman, Anshul Gupta, Samy Tafasca, Xiaocheng Zhang, Jean-Marc Odobez and Sabine Stoll

Developmental change in acquiring overhearable words within naturalistic contexts - Yuchen Jin, Ruthe Foushee, Kennedy Casey and Marisa Casillas

Examining Moderators of Convergent Validity Between Looking-while-listening and Caregiver Report Measures of Word Knowledge - Haley Weaver and Jenny Saffran

Group 6: Lexical Semantics

Verb semantic neighborhood density differently affects verb recognition in 24-month-old late talkers and typically developing peers - Justin B. Kueser, Claney Outzen, MaryCarson Adams, Barbara Brown, Sharon Christ, Campbell Patterson, Risa Stiegler and Arielle Borovsky

Noun-label extension reflects another's intentional actions but not their efficiency - Mohit Mukherji and Moira R. Dillon

Limited cross-linguistic variation in the lexical statistics of nouns in early vocabulary - Samah Abdelrahim and Michael Frank

Group 7: Phonetics and Phonology

Does Brief Exposure Allow 6-month-old English-Learning Infants to Link German to Cognition? - Alison Margaret Lobo and Sandra R. Waxman

Does Variability in the Presentation Schedule Impact Minimal Pair Word Learning? Assessing the Interleaving Effect in 14- and 17-Month-Old Infants - Melina Lauryn Knabe, Tom Fritzsche, Alan Langus, Marc Hullebus, Adamantios Gafos and Barbara Höhle

The acquisition of complex syllabic onsets in Catalan children - Duna Ninyerola, Anna Gavarró and Eulàlia Bonet

Group 8: Semantics & Pragmatics

Acquisition of relevance implicatures in preschool Mandarin-speaking children - Zeying Gao and Peng Zhou

Can someone really fall in despair?: Facilitating children's processing of metaphors through Theory of Mind training - Fatma Nur Ozturk and Duygu Ozge Sarisoy

Children project the presuppositional inferences of co-speech sound effects - Alyssa Vorobey, Nadia Faehndrich and Lyn Tieu

Do second language speakers gesture more or gesture differently when seeing vs when not seeing their communicative partners? - Himmet Sarıtaş and Seyda Ozcaliskan

Group 9: Semantics 1

Mandarin-speaking Infants' Sensitivity to Truth-functional Negation - Yanting Li, Xiaolu Yang, Stella Christie and Rushen Shi

Children's derivation of scalar inference from or-sentences: Evidence from varying the degree of relevance - Maumita Bhaumik

Not nothing: the significance of timing differences in the acquisition of Afrikaans and Dutch geen (‘no') - Theresa Biberauer and Marie van Heukelum

L2 acquisition of Japanese negated disjunction and conjunction by L1 English and L1 Mandarin speakers - Tokiko Okuma

Group 10: Semantics 2

Developmental differences in the categorization and quantification of partial objects - Karissa Sanchez, Kristen Syrett and Athulya Aravind

(Im)possible determiners and their learnability - Tyler Knowlton, John Trueswell and Anna Papafragou

Chinese L2 learner's interpretation of telicity in German - Lea Heßler-Reusch, Ting Xu and Xiaolu Yang

Object animacy as a cue for learning mental verbs without propositional complements - Erin Humphreys and Misha Becker

Group 11: Sign Languages

The use of mutual exclusivity by monolingual and bimodal bilingual ASL users - Allison Fitch and Amy Lieberman

How modality-specific are statistical learning processes in the context of sign languages? Comparing native signers and non-signers - Lizzy Aumonier, Katherine Trice, Zhenghan Qi, Tess Latham and Julia Hofweber

Age of Acquisition Effects in TİD: Quantity and Quality of Nonmanual Markers in Telicity Marking - Aysemin Yaşar and Kadir Gökgöz

Group 12: Syntax 1

Romanian-English bilingual adults are more recursive with adjectives in L1 than in L2 - Deborah Foucault, Tom Roeper and Adina Camelia Bleotu

Complex Morphology in Romani can Resolve the Ambiguity of Multiple Possessives - Jill G. de Villiers, Hristo Kyuchukov and Tyler Poisson

'Strong' weak-island effects in interlanguage: Arguments from D-linking - Takayuki Kimura

Group 13: Syntax 2

Syntactic Maintenance of Tamil Relative Clauses in Multilingual Adolescents - Usha Lakshmanan

Intervention effects in the acquisition of Italian sluicing: the role of Number Mismatch - Elena Pettenon, Emanuela Sanfelici and Victoria Mateu

Gradually increasing context-sensitivity shapes the development of children's verb marking - Hannah Sawyer, Colin Bannard and Julian Pine

Acquisition of Variable Clitic Placement in Spanish-speaking Children - Emily Herman

Group 14: Syntax: Pronouns

(All) pronouns are difficult, but not delayed - evidence in favour of early Principle B acquisition - Nevena Klobucar, Raffaella Folli, Christina Sevdali and Juliana Gerard

The development of pronoun ambiguity resolution in primary school children - Angelika Golegos and Theodoros Marinis

5- & 8-year-olds' interpretation of ambiguous 'they' - Anissa Baird, Nicole Hupalo, Mahnoor Khurram and Emily Atkinson

Group 15: Variation in the Input

How to ask questions to sons vs. daughters: Effect of play partner and play context - Ebru Pinar, Irem Kotuz, Campbell Leaper and Seyda Ozcaliskan

Examining the Role of Teacher Feedback and Structural Features in Children's Vocabulary Learning during Book-Reading Conversations in Under-Resourced Prekindergarten Classrooms - JeanMarie Farrow, Annemarie H. Hindman, Barbara A. Wasik and Michael J. Farrow

The role of parental characteristics, home language experience, and language of schooling in children's Mandarin heritage language development in Canada - Vera Xia, Evangelia Daskalaki, Adriana Soto-Corominas and Johanne Paradis

Parental strategies in bilingual word learning - emily eloise bagan, Caitlyn Slawny and Margarita Kaushanskaya

Why does Mommy refer to herself in the third person? - Payton Summers, Kimberly Saudino and Sudha Arunachalam

Remote posters

Understanding and Creating Metaphors and Similes in Children with High-Functioning Autism - Maria Andreou, Stella Lampri, Theodoros Marinis and Eleni Peristeri

An investigation of syntactic skills in High-Functioning Autism: Interactions with vocabulary and working memory skills - Konstantina Sonia Antoniou, Eleni Peristeri, Theodoros Marinis and Maria Andreou

Metathesis as a means of satisfying preferences of developing grammars - Eirini Ploumidi

Immunity to agreement attraction and limitation of cognitive resources in non-native language comprehension - Itsuki Minemi, Takayuki Kimura, Takaaki Hirokawa, Yu Tamura and Junya Fukuta

The scope of disjunction and negation: evidence from L2 Mandarin and Spanish - Anna Gavarró, Jin Yan and Elena Pagliarini

Developmental trajectories of German as spoken language in normal and hard of hearing children with forced displacement background: a pilot longitudinal study - Lina Abed Ibrahim, Barbara Hänel-Faulhaber and Solveig Chilla

Saturday Posters

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Group 1: Assessment

Presenting the Tool for Assessing Intergenerational Transmission (TITA) within Endangered Language Communities - Kamil Deen, Anna Belew, Peter Chong, Keiko Hata, Kavon Hooshiar, Ryan Henke, Grant Muagututi'a, Anongnard Nusartlert, Anupama Reddy, Jennifer Sou and Sarah Uno

Developing a matched Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) across three languages: English-Spanish-Mandarin (ESM) - Kristy Lai, Huanhuan Shi, Lillian Masek and Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda

Difficulties identifying Specific Reading Disabilities in young children in the multilingual context of rural Zambia - Jodi Reich, Mei Tan and Elena L. Grigorenko

Group 2: Case and Processing

The memory-language interface beyond a grammar-lexicon divide: No effect of procedural memory in children's production of case marking - Iris Nowenstein and Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir

Cue Strength in Predictive Processing in Child Turkish Heritage Speakers: Case vs. Prosody - Selim Tiryakiol, Leyla Zidani-Eroglu, Fatih Bayram and Jiuzhou Hao

The mouse is pulling the hedgehog. Or the other way around? Non-canonical word order comprehension in Czech and German four-year-olds - Jolana Treichelová, Anna Chromá, Filip Smolík and Claudia Friedrich

Group 3: Computational Modeling

Bilingual input separation of rhythmically similar languages: vowel, consonant, and phonotactic cues - Frans Adriaans

Revisiting (Im)possible Interactions in Learning Turkish Laryngeal Alternations - Caleb Belth

Discovering Phonological Representations: The Case of French Liaison - Annika Heuser and Charles Yang

Group 4: Effect of Language on other cognitive domains

Double the language, double the show: Effect of speaker proficiency and elicitation context on speech and gesture production of bilinguals - Armita Ghobadi and Seyda Ozcaliskan

Project GeLaTO: Gender Learning and Trust in Others - Diqi Zeng, Benjamin Munson and Melissa Koenig

I'm convinced! The role of content and manner of delivery in convincing peers in autistic and non-autistic adolescents' persuasive discourse - Jovia Hin Lam Wong, Myriam L. H. Beauchamp, Gigi Luk, Elizabeth Allyn Smith, Kristine H. Onishi, Ana Paquin Domingues and Aparna Nadig

Reciprocal Longitudinal Effects of Vocabulary Knowledge on Emotion Regulation in Low-Income Children from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project - Elizabeth S. Che, Julia R. Moses, Nicole Zapparrata and Patricia J. Brooks

Group 5: Lexical Development

Generalization of verb lexicalization biases reveals cross-domain event primitives crosslinguistically - Sarah Hye-yeon Lee and Anna Papafragou

Sense to Learn: Object sensory properties affect children's word knowledge and processing - Philip Robert Curtis, Amanda Seidl and Arielle Borovsky

Cognates in noun production and comprehension: an analysis of the performance of monolingual and bilingual children - Alicja Jeleń, Zofia Kordas, Martyna Burdach, Ayla Fjeld Skorpen, Nina Gram Garmann, Ewa Haman, Anna Sara Hexeberg Romøren, Jolanta Kilanowska, Karolina Krupa-Gaweł, Magdalena Krysztofiak, Mari Sandbakken and Magdalena Łuniewska-Etenkowska

The effect of double and triple cognates on trilingual children's lexical development - Erin N. Quirk, Miranda Gómez Díaz, Ruth Kircher and Krista Byers-Heinlein

Group 6: Morphology

The relationship between lexical, morphological and syntactic acquisition in English and Estonian - Virve-Anneli Vihman, Caroline Rowland, Seamus Donnelly, Piia Taremaa, Adele Vaks, Ada Urm, Izabela Jordanoska, Anastasia Chuprina and Tiia Tulviste

Inflectional morphology in Turkish heritage speakers and Turkish-American returnees - Aylin Coskun Kunduz and Silvina Montrul

Preferred word formation strategies in L2 English - F. Nihan Ketrez

Group 7: Phonetics and Phonology

Acoustic peripherality and word type but not cross-linguistic similarity predict L2 vowel discrimination accuracy - Juli Cebrian

Feature fission as a mechanism of redeployment beyond fusion: High vowel perception in L2 - Xuanda Chen, Heather Goad and Meghan Clayards

Do bilingual 24-month-olds use sentential context to learn novel words in unfamiliar-accented speech? - Deniz Atik, Alexander LaTourrette, Cynthia Blanco and Sandra R. Waxman

Group 8: Prediction

Linking Prediction and Language Learning in Children: A Case of Verb Bias - Yi-Lun Weng, Amanda Owen Van Horne and Zhenghan Qi

Lexical access during naturalistic listening in middle childhood and early adolescence - Briony Waite, Tatyana Levari, Anthony Yacovone and Jesse Snedeker

Children integrate multiple cues across levels of linguistic representations in real-time sentence comprehension - Scarlet Wan Yee Li, Margarethe McDonald and Tania Zamuner

Group 9: Semantics & Pragmatics

Do children know that PolQs are not AltQs? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese - Yixuan Yan and Yitong Luo

The role of relevance in early metaphor comprehension - Claudia Raihert and Myrto Grigoroglou

The role of context in the comprehension of metaphors: A visual world paradigm study with Turkish preschool children - Isin Tekin and Duygu Ozge Sarisoy

Extending presupposition projection to co-speech gestures: The view from child language - Anita Sritharan, Janice Shum and Lyn Tieu

Group 10: Semantics 1

Conjunction meets negation in contexts that cancel polarity sensitivity: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese - Na Gao and Stephen Crain

Access to alternatives and linguistic units of quantification - David Barner, Hannah Bryer, Miguel Mejia, Sadie Ikin, Meghan Pierce and Mahesh Srinivasan

Generalizations in child language: implicit and explicit adverbial quantification - Janek Guerrini, Kate Kinnaird, Benjamin Dever-Mendenhall and Athulya Aravind

Group 11: Semantics 2

The effect of constraining contexts on the L2 acquisition of English inverse scope - Baorui Xu, Theres Grüter and Bonnie D. Schwartz

'I wish I was blue!': The development of (un)attainable desires in child Greek - Irini Amanaki and Vina Tsakali

Children's acquisition of circumstantial modals: Do they know where necessity can come from? - Chui Yi Lee and Angelica Hill

Group 12: Sign Languages

Handshape change via acquisition in Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN) - Ann Senghas, Samantha Seltzer, Catherine O'Brien and Michele Miozzo

Longitudinal change in argument marking strategies: The first cohort of a new sign language - Rachel Miles and Rachel Mayberry

Pragmatic knowledge in asymmetric language contexts - Madeline Quam, Annemarie Kocab and Marie Coppola

Group 13: Syntactic Bootstrapping

Distributional history of pseudowords informs word-referent mappings, but only when language has semantic seeds - Abigail Laver, Heesu Yun, Albert Kim and John Trueswell

Syntactic complementation signals emotion/mental state, but not color or shape, for young children acquiring adjectives - Kristen Syrett and Misha Becker

28-month-olds use inferred thematic relations to bootstrap intransitive verb meanings - Laurel Perkins, Victoria Mateu and Nina Hyams

Group 14: Syntax 1

The role of discourse in Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of ambiguous wh-adjuncts - Xuan Wang, Na Gao, Yan Shi and Utako Minai

Movement Constraints Lead to Better Learning of Syntactic Structure - Jessica A. Kotfila, Heidi Getz and Elissa L. Newport

Children can use distributional cues to acquire recursive structures - Daoxin Li and Kathryn Schuler

Agentivity and Unaccusativity in L2 English Acquisition - Yu Tazaki and Satoshi Hattori

More evidence on the UG-constrained knowledge of argument structure in L2 grammar - Takaaki Hirokawa and Takayuki Kimura

Group 15: Syntax 2

Subject and object wh-question comprehension among Farsi-speaking adults, monolingual children, and heritage child speakers of Farsi - Tina Ghaemi and Anamaria Bentea

The grammatical root of learning bias: Evidence from Mandarin-learning toddlers' early word order sensitivity - Lean Luo, Xiaolu Yang, Stella Christie and Rushen Shi

Role of contextual cues in preschoolers' comprehension of Mandarin relative clauses - Jiawei Shi and Peng Zhou

Acquisition of particle drop in Japanese: a preliminary study - Yoshiki Fujiwara

Group 16: Variation in the Input

Spanish-English bilingual parents and children codeswitch more often when reading bilingual vs. monolingual books - Marissa Anne Castellana, Christine Potter and Viridiana Benitez

Comparing caregiver-child interactions in ASL and English: the influence of reading modality - Savannah Tellander and Allison Fitch

Preschoolers learn novel words in even difficult learning circumstances - Charlotte Emma Moore, Madison E. Williams and Krista Byers-Heinlein

Older sibling effect on language development disappears in elementary school-aged children - Shiori Sato, Hiroki Higuchi, Asami Shinohara, Tessei Kobayashi, Tomoko Nishimura, Toshiki Iwabuchi and Kenji J. Tsuchiya

Remote posters

Online Application of Binding Principle A in L1 and L2 Sentence Processing - Sujeewa Hettiarachchi, Bimali Indrarathne, Norbert Vanek and Stepan Matejka

Contexts of language learning in 9 typologically diverse languages: Predicting child language by contingent adult speech - olivier rüst, Marco Baroni and Sabine Stoll

Variation in the realization of word-final codas in loanwords: Evidence from child Greek - Ioanna Kappa and Eirini Ploumidi

How do mothers and children initiate conversational exchanges?: The dynamics of multimodal cue usage in beginning vocal exchanges across child development - Jun Ho Chai, Barbara Zapiór and Eon-Suk Ko

Investigating vowel hyperarticulation in infant-directed speech: insights from Korean mother-infant interactions - Eon-Suk Ko and Sunghye Cho

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BUCLD 49 schedule

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Abstract

Friday, November 8th, 2024

Alisha B. Compton, Anna Banaszkiewicz, Jin Wang and James R. Booth

Ran Wei, Ulf Liszkowski, Paul Harris and Meredith Rowe

Evangelia Daskalaki, Aretousa Giannakou, Christina Haska and Vicky Chondrogianni

Anqi Hu, Katherine Trice, Pradyumna Lanka and Zhenghan Qi

Lillianna Righter and Elika Bergelson

Anamaria Bentea and Theodoros Marinis

Jennifer R. Barbosa, Lauren C. Shuffrey, William P. Fifer and Laura Lakusta

Jessamine Jeter, Naja Ferjan Ramirez and Myriam Lapierre

Matthew Ayobami Ajibade

Brynn Siles, Anqi Hu, Kelly Chan, Anna Ciriello, Morten H. Christiansen and Zhenghan Qi

Eugenia Lukin and Elika Bergelson

Victoria Mateu and Nina Hyams

Bhuvana Narasimhan, Rebecca Scarborough, Allison Hilger, Kanupriya Kale, Justin Bai, Chloe Circenis, Tessa Moskoff, Zohar Naaman and Conner Moses

Nancy Eng, Stanley Chen, Lauren Levy and Zarina Rakhmanova

Sarah Dolscheid and Martina Penke

Sarah Creel, Anges Vu and Kristie McCrary Kambourakis

Emily Silvano, Ziqi Chen, Zaida McClinton and Marina Bedny

Penelope Daniel

Federica Bulgarelli

Irene Canudas Grabolosa, Madeline Quam, Marie Coppola, Jesse C. Snedeker and Annemarie Kocab

Ting Xu, Lyn Tieu and Stella Christie

Daniel Swingley

Qi Cheng

Nina Schoener and Mahesh Srinivasan

Fenqi Wang, Andrew Cheng, Farzana Ali, Antonius Tam and Henny Yeung

Victor Gomes, Yubin Huh, Heesu Yun and John Trueswell

Yuanfan Ying, Alexander Williams, Valentine Hacquard and Jeffrey Lidz

Abstract

Saturday, November 9th, 2024

Feng Xu, Ping Tang, Katherine Demuth and Nan Xu Rattanasone

Caitlyn Slawny, Emma J. Libersky and Margarita Kaushanskaya

Hannah B. Lam, Johanne Paradis and Adriana Soto Corominas

Kevin Liang and Megha Sundara

Sophie Regan and Mahesh Srinivasan

Ajna F. Kertesz and Catharine Echols

Simona Montanari, Jeremy Steffman and Robert Mayr

Kennedy Casey and Casey Lew-Williams

Ali Shahidy and Usha Lakshmanan (presented remotely)

Nathalie Fernandez, Rose Griffin, Patrick Shafto and Naomi Feldman

Marina Ortega-Andres, Sophie Regan, Hugh Rabagliati and Mahesh Srinivasan (presented remotely)

Emily Zane, Anil Ramakrishna, Julia Mertens, Shrikanth Narayanan and Ruth Grossman

Sathvik Nair, Katherine Howitt, Allison Dods and Robert Hopkins

Khuyen Nha Le and David Barner

Zoe Ovans, Barbara Landau, Heesu Yun, Sarah Yi and John Trueswell

Caroline Beech and Daniel Swingley

Yukun Yu, Amanda Rose Yuile, Damian Ishak and Cynthia Fisher

Yi Lin, Agata Bochynska, Daniel D. Dilks and Moira R. Dillon

Eleni Peristeri, Ioannis Vogindroukas and Ianthi Maria Tsimpli (presented remotely)

Leticia Schiavon Kolberg, Mayara de Sa Pinto, Giulio Massari, Clara Dargent, Anne Caroline Fievet and Alex de Carvalho

Yanxin (Alice) Zhu and Theres Grüter

Elana Pontecorvo, Amelia A. Becker, Amy Lieberman, Jennie Pyers and Naomi Caselli

Elise Breitfeld and Jenny Saffran

Xin Yan and Shanshan Yan

Johana Chaparro Moreno

Yiqun Zhang, Marisa Casillas and Subin Kim

Ehsan Solaimani, Vicky Chondrogianni, Anamaria Bentea, Hélène Delage, Pauline Wolfer, Franziska Baumeister and Stephanie Durrleman (presented remotely)

Jiuzhou Hao, Patrick Sturt, Jason Rothman and Vicky Chondrogianni

Marisa Casillas, Ruthe Foushee and Kennedy Casey

Silke Brandt, Anna Theakston and Jacky Chan

Abstract

Sunday, November 10th, 2024

Theres Grüter and Sachiko Roos

Annemarie Kocab, Madeline Quam, Marie Coppola and Jesse Snedeker

Munir Ozturhan and Utako Minai

Erin E. Campbell, Lillianna Righter and Elika Bergelson

Yuting Zhang, Hao Lin and Qi Cheng

Ebru Evcen and David Barner

Andrea Sander-Montant, Laia Fibla and Krista Byers-Heinlein

Xiaolong Lu and Jue Wang

Elizabeth Swanson, Ana Antonio and Alex de Carvalho

Margaret Kandel, Nan Li and Jesse C. Snedeker

Tania Ionin, Amy Yuiko Atiles, Chae Eun Lee and Mien-Jen Wu

Yunqi He, Aijun Huang, Likan Zhan and Fuyun Wu

Friday Posters (Session I)

Knowledge of Morphological Case in Adult Heritage Western Armenian - Annika Topelian and Acrisio Pires

Heritage children's real-time processing of case marking cues in which-questions: Evidence from a cross-national eye-tracking study on heritage Greek in the UK and the US - Vicky Chondrogianni, Jiuzhou Hao, Aikaterini Pantoula and Richard Schwarttz