In Mandarin, the head noun in [modifier clause-de-N] encodes not only the arguments or adjuncts of the clausal verbs (e.g. “John/biscuits/plate” in the event of “John eating biscuits”) but also non-argument, non-adjunct participants extended from the clausal event (e.g. “crumbs” resulting from the event of “John eating biscuits”). This article adopts a typological, multi-factorial analytic framework of noun-modifying clause constructions (NMCCs) and proposes a developmental hierarchy of three types of NMCCs: argument > adjunct > extended. We tested the hierarchy in two studies: an analysis of 728 tokens of NMCC produced by 369 children (1;2–6;9) in naturalistic corpora and a contextualised sentence repetition task conducted with 121 children (3;0–4;11) in China. Our findings show that NMCC emerges surprisingly early around 2;0 in Mandarin children. Argument NMCCs show developmental primacy in frequency and accuracy. Adjunct and extended NMCCs are acquired at a later stage, consistent with the proposed hierarchy.

In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix?, learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb (what) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency between an expression and something that has no overt phonological form? We propose that identifying abstract syntactic dependencies requires statistical inference over both overt linguistic material and unsatisfied grammatical expectations: noticing when a predicted argument for a verb is unexpectedly missing may serve as evidence for the gap of an argument movement dependency. We provide computational support for this hypothesis. We develop a learner that uses predicted but unexpectedly missing objects of verbs to identify possible gaps of object movement, and identifies which surface morphosyntactic properties of sentences are correlated with these possible movement gaps. We find that it is in principle possible for a learner using this mechanism to identify the majority of sentences with object movement in child-directed English, and that prior knowledge of which verbs require objects provides an important guide for identifying which surface distributions characterize object movement. This provides a computational account for why verb argument-structure knowledge developmentally precedes the acquisition of movement in a language like English. More broadly, these findings illustrate how statistical learning and learning from violated expectations can be combined to novel effect in the domain of language acquisition.

A persistent mystery in language acquisition is how speakers are able to learn seemingly arbitrary distributional restrictions. This article investigates one such case: the fact that speakers resist using certain adjectives prenominally (e.g. ??the asleep man). Experiment 1 indicates that speakers tentatively generalize or CATEGORIZE the distributional restriction beyond their previous experience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that speakers are sensitive to STATISTICAL PREEMPTION—that is, speakers learn not to use a formulation if an alternative formulation with the same function is consistently witnessed. Moreover, they are able to generalize the restriction to apply to other members of the category as well. Finally, experiment 3 finds evidence that speakers DISCOUNT a pseudo-preemptive context, rationally ignoring it as uninformative.

Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. Marge pulled the box to Homer/Marge pulled Homer the box). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a negative correlation was observed between verb frequency and the acceptability of errors, across all age groups. Adults additionally displayed sensitivity to narrow-range semantic constraints on the alternation, rejecting double-object dative uses of novel verbs consistent with prepositional-dative-only classes and vice versa. Adults also provided evidence for the psychological validity of a proposed morphophonological constraint prohibiting Latinate verbs from appearing in the double-object dative. These findings are interpreted in the light of a recent account of argument-structure acquisition, under which children retreat from error by incrementally learning the semantic, phonological, and pragmatic properties associated with particular verbs and particular construction slots.

Noun-class prefixes are obligatory in most Bantu languages. However, the Sotho languages (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi) permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of ‘unmarked’ phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Using longitudinal data from three Sesotho-speaking children, this article shows that the conditions needed to license null prefixes have been learned before the age of three, suggesting early abilities for grammatical generalization even at the intersection of different levels of linguistic structure. The implications for learnability theory and Bantu linguistic structure more generally are discussed.

The status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated (Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Miller & Sag 1997, De Cat 2007b, and many others). Distributional properties of French subject clitics have led Kayne (1975), Rizzi (1986), and others to analyze them as argument-bearing elements occupying canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of the phonology. While this hypothesis enjoys a wide following, a growing body of evidence suggests that it fails to capture patterns of subject-clitic use in colloquial French dialects/registers (Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Zribi-Hertz 1994, Miller & Sag 1997). Using new evidence from prosodic and corpus analyses, speaker judgments, and crosslinguistic typology, this article argues that (i) European Colloquial French exhibits differences from Standard French that impact how subject clitics are best analyzed, and more specifically (ii) subject clitics in European Colloquial French are affixal agreement markers, not phonological clitic arguments.

We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb-final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with a variety of complement-taking verbs. Early in development, however, verb-final complements and verb-second complements are used with separate sets of complement-taking verbs, and they are used with separate sets of item-specific main-clause phrases. For example, initially phrases such as ‘I want to see’ were used exclusively with verb-final complements, whereas phrases such as ‘do you see’ and ‘you have to say’ were used exclusively with verb-second complements. Only later in development—when specific complement-taking verbs were used with both verb-second and verb-final complements, with a greater variety of main-clause phrases, and when specific main-clause phrases were used with both verb-second and verb-final complements—was there evidence for structural links between these various, item-based, complement-clause constructions.

In recent years linguists have gained new insight into human language capacities on the basis of results from linguistics and biology. The so-called biolinguistic enterprise aims to fill in the explanatory gap between language and biology, on both theoretical and experimental grounds, hoping to reach a deeper understanding of language as a phenomenon rooted in biology. This research program is taking its first steps, and it has already given rise to new insights on the human language capacity, as well as to controversies, echoing debates that go back to the earlier days of generative grammar. The present discussion piece provides a high-level characterization of biolinguistics. It highlights the main articulation of this research program and points to recent studies linking language and biology. It also compares the biolinguistic program, as defined in Chomsky 2005 and Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011, to the view of the human language faculty presented in Jackendoff 2002 and Culicover & Jackendoff 2005, and to the discussion in Jackendoff 2011.

We discuss three points relevant to Kissine's (2021) target article on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its implications for theories of language acquisition. First, we argue that individuals with ASD do have social communication abilities and that these are linked to their language abilities; therefore, ASD does not provide evidence that language competence and language use are dissociable. Second, we argue that typically developing children show remarkable abilities to learn new words in noninteractive situations, and thus these abilities are not unique to ASD. Third, we point out that even noninteractive situations can serve as models for, and can implicate, children's social communication abilities. In sum, we agree with Kissine that children (with and without ASD) are skilled language learners, able to take diverse paths to learning and to benefit from many different kinds of learning situations. However, as to whether these abilities in themselves demonstrate a threat to constructionist approaches to language acquisition, we do not think that Kissine has accrued a compelling case.

Subjacency characterizes a set of phenomena whose acquisition must be explained by any proposal for human language learning. We take a broader perspective than previous responses to Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014), arguing that they have not shown that this UG principle is ‘redundant’ because their proposed alternative does not take into account firmly established constraints on A-bar dependencies. We illustrate a range of challenges for theories hoping to reduce subjacency to independently motivated, primarily nonsyntactic constraints: they must include a way to account for attested crosslinguistic variation in island effects, the cross-construction generality of island effects, and the effects of resumption and of WH-in-situ on island behavior.

Pater's (2019) target article proposes that neural networks will provide theories of learning that generative grammar lacks. We argue that his enthusiasm is premature since the biases of neural networks are largely unknown, and he disregards decades of work on machine learning and learnability. Learning biases form a two-way street: all learners have biases, and those biases constrain the space of learnable grammars in mathematically measurable ways. Analytical methods from the related fields of computational learning theory and grammatical inference allow one to study language learning, neural networks, and linguistics at an appropriate level of abstraction. The only way to satisfy our hunger and to make progress on the science of language learning is to confront these core issues directly.