Evan Kidd
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 149506 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Evan Kidd |
| NOMBRES | Evan |
| APELLIDO | Kidd |
| FIRMA | KIDD E |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4301-2290 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 80 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 63 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Developing language in a developing body
Background Mastering gross motor abilities in early infancy and culturally defined actions (e.g. self‐care routines) in late infancy can initiate cascading developmental changes that affect language learning. Here, we adopt a genetic perspective to investigate underlying processes, implicating either shared or “gateway” mechanisms, where the latter enable children to interact with their environment. Methods Selecting heritable traits ( h 2 , heri…
The Acquisition of African Languages
Africa contains over one quarter of the languages currently used on the planet. The languages and the contexts in which they are used are diverse and therefore have much to teach us about language acquisition. However, African languages are chronically underrepresented in the language acquisition literature. This special issue of First Language contains 13 papers reporting new research findings on African languages, including studies investigatin…
The Scientific and Cultural Cost of Convenience Sampling in the Face of Rising Language Endangerment
We live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss. In the midst of this crisis, it is becoming more and more evident that the psychological and cognitive sciences know very little about how most of the world’s languages are acquired, represented, and processed. Therefore, the opportunity to understand our most important and defining species-specific trait is being rapidly lost. In this Perspective, we highlight the extent of this …
Incremental processing in a polysynthetic language (Murrinhpatha)
Language processing is rapidly incremental, but evidence bearing upon this assumption comes from very few languages. In this paper we report on a study of incremental processing in Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic Australian language, which expresses complex sentence-level meanings in a single verb, the full meaning of which is not clear until the final morph. Forty native Murrinhpatha speakers participated in a visual world eyetracking experiment i…
Online data collection to address language sampling bias
The COVID-19 pandemic has massively limited how linguists can collect data, and out of necessity, researchers across several disciplines have moved data collection online. Here we argue that the rising popularity of remote web-based experiments also provides an opportunity for widening the context of linguistic research by facilitating data collection from understudied populations. We discuss collecting production data from adult native speakers …
Consonant Neutralization and Vowel Space Area in Tashlhiyt Berber’s Infant-Directed Speech
Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) and Adult-Directed Speech (ADS) are two registers that can differ across multiple linguistic domains and social contexts. In languages where the phonemes’ acoustic clarity is modified, there is a typical assumption in the literature that these phonemes are either hyper - or hypo -articulated. These modifications have received considerable attention in language research, serving as the basis of proposals concerning the…
The separability of early vocabulary and grammar knowledge
We use novel statistical methods to study the separability of vocabulary and grammar. • Vocabulary and grammar are partially separable by two years of age. • This is an important developmental benchmark for models of language acquisition. A long-standing question in language development concerns the nature of the relationship between early lexical and grammatical knowledge. The very strong correlation between the two has led some to argue that le…
A comparative study of child-directed language across five cultures based on data from the Acquisition Sketch Project
Special Issue: In Memory of Barbara F. Kelly
How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia)
Sentence production is a stage‐like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a sentence planning and production study in Pitjantjatjara, an Australian Indigenous language that has highly…
A meta-analysis of syntactic priming experiments in children
A substantial literature exists using the syntactic priming methodology with children to test hypotheses regarding the acquisition of syntax, under the assumption that priming effects reveal both the presence of syntactic knowledge and the underlying nature of learning mechanisms supporting the acquisition of grammar. Here we present the first meta-analysis of syntactic priming studies in children. We identified 37 eligible studies and extracted …
Production of relative clauses in Cantonese-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
Finding your voice
How does linguistic context influence word learning
While there are well-known demonstrations that children can use distributional information to acquire multiple components of language, the underpinnings of these achievements are unclear. In the current paper, we investigate the potential pre-requisites for a distributional learning model that can explain how children learn their first words. We review existing literature and then present the results of a series of computational simulations with …
Uncovering ergative use in Murrinhpatha
Murrinhpatha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, has an extant ergative case marker that has been reported to be very rare in use. In this paper we report on the use of ergative marking in an experimental study of sentence production. Forty-six adult L1 speakers of Murrinhpatha were asked to describe a series of unrelated bivalent scenes that were manipulated for humanness ( human) in the agen…
Close Encounters of the Word Kind
Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners' prior expectations about how component units co-occur. In this study, we investigated how adults' prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning task. Forty German-speaking adults completed a speech repetition task in which they repeated eight-sy…
Why we need a gradient approach to word order
This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language ac…
Implicit learning of structure across time
Where to from here? Increasing language coverage while building a more diverse discipline
Our original target article highlighted some significant shortcomings in the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a handful of other Indo-European languages that partly has its origins in a lack of researcher diversity. In this article, we respond to the 21 commentaries on our original article. The commentaries highlighted both the importance of attention to typological features of lang…
How diverse is child language acquisition research
A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal…
The Content of Gender Stereotypes Embedded in Language Use
Gender stereotypes have endured despite substantial change in gender roles. Previous work has assessed how gender stereotypes affect language production in particular interactional contexts. Here, we assessed communication biases where context was less specified: written texts to diffuse audiences. We used Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to computationally quantify the similarity in meaning between gendered names and stereotype-linked terms in the…
Study protocol
This will be one of the largest neuroimaging studies to date that investigates the developmental shift in L2 learning covering preadolescence to adulthood. Our comprehensive approach of combining behavioral and neuroimaging data will contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms influencing this developmental shift and individual differences in new language learning. We aim to answer: (I) do these fingerprints differ according to age and can …
Symbolic play as a zone of proximal development
Symbolic play has long been considered a beneficial context for development. According to Cultural Learning theory, one reason for this is that symbolically‐infused dialogical interactions constitute a zone of proximal development. However, the dynamics of caregiver‐child interactions during symbolic play are still not fully understood. In the current study, we investigated informational exchange between fifty‐two 24‐month‐old infants and their p…
Word Segmentation Cues in German Child-Directed Speech
To acquire language, infants must learn to segment words from running speech. A significant body of experimental research shows that infants use multiple cues to do so; however, little research has comprehensively examined the distribution of such cues in naturalistic speech. We conducted a comprehensive corpus analysis of German child-directed speech (CDS) using data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database, investigating …
Acquiring verb-argument structure in Tagalog
Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined t…
Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language
Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for hum…
Implicit statistical learning is directly associated with the acquisition of syntax
This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of verbal and nonverbal ability. They also completed a syntactic priming task, which provided a dynamic inde…
English-Speaking Children's Comprehension of Relative Clauses
Lexical frequency and exemplar-based learning effects in language acquisition
Investigating the Role of Verbal Working Memory in Young Children's Sentence Comprehension
This study considers the role of verbal working memory in sentence comprehension in typically developing English-speaking children. Fifty-six (N = 56) children aged 4;0-6;6 completed a test of language comprehension that contained sentences which varied in complexity, standardized tests of vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence, and three tests of memory that measured the three verbal components of Baddeley's model of Working Memory (WM): the phon…
The discourse bases of relativization
Author: Brandt, Silke et al.; Genre: Journal Article; Issued: 2009; Title: The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
Word Segmentation Cues in German Child-Directed Speech
To acquire language, infants must learn to segment words from running speech. A significant body of experimental research shows that infants use multiple cues to do so; however, little research has comprehensively examined the distribution of such cues in naturalistic speech. We conducted a comprehensive corpus analysis of German child-directed speech (CDS) using data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) database, investigating …
Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language
Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for hum…
Why we need a gradient approach to word order
This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language ac…
Acquiring verb-argument structure in Tagalog
Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined t…
Individual Differences in First Language Acquisition
Humans vary in almost every dimension imaginable, and language is no exception. In this article, we review the past research that has focused on individual differences (IDs) in first language acquisition. We first consider how different theoretical traditions in language acquisition treat IDs, and we argue that a focus on IDs is important given its potential to reveal the developmental dynamics and architectural constraints of the linguistic syst…
Uncovering ergative use in Murrinhpatha
Murrinhpatha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, has an extant ergative case marker that has been reported to be very rare in use. In this paper we report on the use of ergative marking in an experimental study of sentence production. Forty-six adult L1 speakers of Murrinhpatha were asked to describe a series of unrelated bivalent scenes that were manipulated for humanness ( human) in the agen…
Language, Culture, and Group Membership
Languages are strong markers of social identity. Multiple features of language and speech, from accent to lexis to grammatical constructions, mark speakers as members of specific cultural groups. In the current article, we present two confederate-scripted studies that investigated the social effects of the Australian hypocoristic use (e.g., uggie, uni, derro)-a lexical category emblematic of Australian culture. Participants took turns with a conf…
An investigation into the effect of play-based instruction on the development of play skills and oral language
The current study investigated the influence of a play-based curriculum on the development of pretend play skills and oral language in children attending their first year of formal schooling. In this quasi-experimental design, two groups of children were followed longitudinally across the first 6 months of their first year at school. The children in the experimental group were attending a school with a play-based curriculum; the children in the c…
The effect of frequency and phonological neighbourhood density on the acquisition of past tense verbs by Finnish children
The acquisition of the past tense has received substantial attention in the psycholinguistics literature, yet most studies report data from English or closely related Indo-European languages. We report on a past tense elicitation study on 136 4–6-year-old children that were acquiring a highly inflected Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language—Finnish. The children were tested on real and novel verbs (N = 120) exhibiting (1) productive, (2) semi-productive, …
Did you have a choccie bickie this arvo? A quantitative look at Australian hypocoristics
Early Sensitivity to Discourse-Level Anomalies
Two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the speed with which readers were sensitive to discourse-level anomalies. An account arguing for delayed sensitivity (Guzman & Klin, 2000 Guzman, A. E. and Klin, C. M. 2000. Maintaining global coherence in reading: The role of sentence boundaries.. Memory & Cognition, 28: 722–730. [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) was contrasted with one allowing for rapid sensitivity (My…
Close Encounters of the Word Kind
Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners' prior expectations about how component units co-occur. In this study, we investigated how adults' prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning task. Forty German-speaking adults completed a speech repetition task in which they repeated eight-sy…
Symbolic play as a zone of proximal development
Symbolic play has long been considered a beneficial context for development. According to Cultural Learning theory, one reason for this is that symbolically‐infused dialogical interactions constitute a zone of proximal development. However, the dynamics of caregiver‐child interactions during symbolic play are still not fully understood. In the current study, we investigated informational exchange between fifty‐two 24‐month‐old infants and their p…
The acquisition of the multiple senses of with
The present article reports on an investigation of one child's acquisition of the multiple senses of the preposition with from 2;0–4;0. Two competing claims regarding children's early representation and subsequent acquisition of with were investigated. The “multiple meanings” hypothesis predicts that children form individual form-meaning pairings for with as separate lexical entries. The “monosemy approach” (McKercher 2001) claims that children a…
English-Speaking Children's Comprehension of Relative Clauses
Relative clause comprehension revisited
Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating three- and four-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RC). From the results she argues, contrary to Hamburger & Crain (1982), that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of RCs before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This note evaluates this conclusion on the basis of the methodology used, and proposes that an account o…
Grammars, parsers, and language acquisition
Drozd's critique of Crain & Thornton's (C&T) (1998) book Investigations in Universal Grammar (IUG) raises many issues concerning theory and experimental design within generative approaches to language acquisition. I focus here on one of the strongest theoretical claims of the Modularity Matching Model (MMM): continuity of processing. For reasons different to Drozd, I argue that the assumption is tenuous. Furthermore, I argue that the focus of the…
Lexical and referential cues to sentence interpretation
This paper reports on an investigation of children's (aged 3;5–9;8) comprehension of sentences containing ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment. Results from a picture selection study ( N =90) showed that children use verb semantics and preposition type to resolve the ambiguity, with older children also showing sensitivity to the definiteness of the object NP as a cue to interpretation. Study 2 investigated three- and five-year-old ch…
Lexical and referential influences on on-line spoken language comprehension
This paper reports on two studies investigating children's and adults' processing of sentences containing ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment. Study 1 used corpus data to investigate whether cues argued to be used by adults to resolve PP-attachment ambiguities are available in child-directed speech. Study 2 was an on-line reaction time study investigating the role of lexical and referential biases in syntactic ambiguity resolution b…
I'm are what I'm are
The present study investigates the development of am in the speech of one English-speaking child, Scarlett (aged 4;6–5;6). We show that am is infrequent in the speech addressed to children; the acquisition of this form of BE presents a unique insight into the processes underlying language development because children have little evidence regarding its correct use. Scarlett produced a pervasive error where she overextended are to first-person sing…
The acquisition of the multiple senses of with
The present article reports on an investigation of one child's acquisition of the multiple senses of the preposition with from 2;0–4;0. Two competing claims regarding children's early representation and subsequent acquisition of with were investigated. The “multiple meanings” hypothesis predicts that children form individual form-meaning pairings for with as separate lexical entries. The “monosemy approach” (McKercher 2001) claims that children a…
The discourse bases of relativization
Author: Brandt, Silke et al.; Genre: Journal Article; Issued: 2009; Title: The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses
Early Sensitivity to Discourse-Level Anomalies
Two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the speed with which readers were sensitive to discourse-level anomalies. An account arguing for delayed sensitivity (Guzman & Klin, 2000 Guzman, A. E. and Klin, C. M. 2000. Maintaining global coherence in reading: The role of sentence boundaries.. Memory & Cognition, 28: 722–730. [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) was contrasted with one allowing for rapid sensitivity (My…
The Personality Correlates of Adults Who Had Imaginary Companions in Childhood
Two studies showed that adults who reported having an imaginary companion as a child differed from adults who did not on certain personality dimensions. The first yielded a higher mean on the Gough Creative Personality Scale for the group who had imaginary companions. Study 2 showed that such adults scored higher on the Achievement and Absorption subscales of Tellegen's Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire. The results suggest that some dif…
The Personality Correlates of Adults Who Had Imaginary Companions in Childhood 1,2
Two studies showed that adults who reported having an imaginary companion as a child differed from adults who did not on certain personality dimensions. The first yielded a higher mean on the Gough Creative Personality Scale for the group who had imaginary companions. Study 2 showed that such adults scored higher on the Achievement and Absorption subscales of Tellegen's Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire. The results suggest that some dif…
Lexical frequency and exemplar-based learning effects in language acquisition
Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do
In this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it became apparent that a test sentence was syntactically ambiguous, suggesting they considered the two …
Did you have a choccie bickie this arvo? A quantitative look at Australian hypocoristics
The effect of frequency and phonological neighbourhood density on the acquisition of past tense verbs by Finnish children
The acquisition of the past tense has received substantial attention in the psycholinguistics literature, yet most studies report data from English or closely related Indo-European languages. We report on a past tense elicitation study on 136 4–6-year-old children that were acquiring a highly inflected Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language—Finnish. The children were tested on real and novel verbs (N = 120) exhibiting (1) productive, (2) semi-productive, …
Implicit statistical learning is directly associated with the acquisition of syntax
This article reports on an individual differences study that investigated the role of implicit statistical learning in the acquisition of syntax in children. One hundred children ages 4 years 5 months through 6 years 11 months completed a test of implicit statistical learning, a test of explicit declarative learning, and standardized tests of verbal and nonverbal ability. They also completed a syntactic priming task, which provided a dynamic inde…
Associations among play, gesture and early spoken language acquisition
The present study investigated the developmental interrelationships between play, gesture use and spoken language development in children aged 18–31 months. The children completed two tasks: (i) a structured measure of pretend (or ‘symbolic’) play and (ii) a measure of vocabulary knowledge in which children have been shown to gesture. Additionally, their productive spoken language knowledge was measured via parental report. The results indicated …
Investigating the Role of Verbal Working Memory in Young Children's Sentence Comprehension
This study considers the role of verbal working memory in sentence comprehension in typically developing English-speaking children. Fifty-six (N = 56) children aged 4;0-6;6 completed a test of language comprehension that contained sentences which varied in complexity, standardized tests of vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence, and three tests of memory that measured the three verbal components of Baddeley's model of Working Memory (WM): the phon…
Resumptive elements aid comprehension of object relative clauses
The current study investigated the role of resumption in the interpretation of object relative clauses (RCs) in Persian-speaking children. Sixty-four ( N =64) children aged 3;2–6;0 ( M =4;8) completed a referent selection task that tested their comprehension of subject RCs, gapped object RCs, and object RCs containing either a resumptive pronoun or an object clitic. The results showed that the presence of a resumptive element (pronoun or clitic) …
Incorporating learning into theories of parsing
ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of LanguageIn their target article, Phillips and Ehrenhofer (2015; P&E) present a sketch of how concepts and methods from adult language processing could be used to illuminate first and second language acquisition.This is by no means the first attempt to find common ground between fields that often work independently of each other (e.g
The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses…
Authors' response
Peer-reviewed
Indigenous children’s language
A comprehensive theory of language acquisition must explain how human infants can learn any one of the world’s 7000 or so languages. As such, an important part of understanding how languages are learned is to investigate acquisition across a range of diverse languages and sociocultural contexts. To this end, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural language research has been pervasive in the field of first language acquisition since the early 1980s. I…
An investigation into the effect of play-based instruction on the development of play skills and oral language
The current study investigated the influence of a play-based curriculum on the development of pretend play skills and oral language in children attending their first year of formal schooling. In this quasi-experimental design, two groups of children were followed longitudinally across the first 6 months of their first year at school. The children in the experimental group were attending a school with a play-based curriculum; the children in the c…
Language, Culture, and Group Membership
Languages are strong markers of social identity. Multiple features of language and speech, from accent to lexis to grammatical constructions, mark speakers as members of specific cultural groups. In the current article, we present two confederate-scripted studies that investigated the social effects of the Australian hypocoristic use (e.g., uggie, uni, derro)-a lexical category emblematic of Australian culture. Participants took turns with a conf…
Psychology (55 obras) · Linguistics (51 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (41 obras) · Computer Science (32 obras) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (28 obras) · Reading and Literacy Development (27 obras) · Cognitive psychology (26 obras) · Natural language processing (21 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (19 obras) · Language acquisition (17 obras)