We explore children’s use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want, and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but ...

Child language acquisition epitomises a uniquely rapid and sophisticated learning process underpinned by a complex interplay between innate cognitive mechanisms and environmental influences. Infants ...

Language acquisition in early childhood represents a fundamental aspect of human cognitive development, where children rapidly transform acoustic signals into a rich, structured linguistic system.

Between the ages of one and two, toddlers typically rapidly expand their vocabularies. Tots seem to suddenly go from babbling hesitantly to confidently chatting up a storm. But it turns out the leap ...

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Building on the work of Noam Chomsky, she designed elegant experiments to show that syntax is hard-wired into the human brain. By Clay Risen Lila Gleitman, whose pioneering work in linguistics and ...