Julian M Pine

Biographic Data

ID799203
NAMEJulian M Pine
GIVEN NAMESJulian M
FAMILY NAMEPine
SIGNATUREPINE J M
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Liverpool
ORCID0000-0002-7077-9713
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS53
TOTAL CITATIONS26
AUTHOR COUNT53
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1989
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX4

  • Shifting toward progressive and balanced interaction

    Open AccessTomoko Tatsumi, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2026

    Children’s speech becomes longer and more complex as they develop, but the reasons for this have been insufficiently studied. This study examines how changing linguistic choices in children are linked to interactive factors by analysing Who-question sequences in Japanese child–caregiver conversations. The interactive factors in focus are progressivity and balanced joint activity, which are core aspects of conversational interaction. Our analysis …

  • Simulating the Relationship Between Nonword Repetition Performance and Vocabulary Growth in 2-Year-Olds

    Open AccessCaroline F Rowland, Amy Bidgood et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning2025References: 72

    A strong predictor of children's language is performance on non-word repetition (NWR) tasks. However, the basis of this relationship remains unknown. Some suggest that NWR tasks measure phonological working memory, which then affects language growth. Others argue that children's knowledge of language/language experience affects NWR performance. A complicating factor is that most studies focus on school-aged children, who have already mastered key…

  • Toddlers' Verb-Marking Errors Are Predicted by the Relative Frequency of Uninflected Sequences in Well-Formed Child-Directed Speech

    Open AccessHerbert Sawyer, Colin Bannard et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning2024References: 31

    Verb-marking errors such as she play football and daddy singing are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed speech. We tested this proposal via a preregistered corpus analysis and asked at what level the effects occur: Is it the relative f…

  • Mosaic

    Open AccessDaniel Freudenthal, Fernand Gobet et al.ARTICLELanguage Learning2024References: 30

    This study extended an existing crosslinguistic model of verb-marking errors in children's early multiword speech (MOSAIC) by adding a novel mechanism that defaults to the most frequent form of the verb where this accounts for a high proportion of forms in the input. Our simulations showed that the resulting model not only provides a better explanation of the data on typically developing children but also captures the crosslinguistic pattern of v…

  • Learning to generalise but not segment an artificial language at 17 months predicts children’s language skills 3 years later

    Open AccessP Monaghan, Seamus Donnelly et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2023

    We investigated whether learning an artificial language at 17 months was predictive of children's natural language vocabulary and grammar skills at 54 months. Children at 17 months listened to an artificial language containing non-adjacent dependencies, and were then tested on their learning to segment and to generalise the structure of the language. At 54 months, children were then tested on a range of standardised natural language tasks that as…

  • Building a unified model of the Optional Infinitive Stage

    Open AccessJulian M Pine, Daniel Freudenthal et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2023

    Verb-marking errors are a characteristic feature of the speech of typically-developing (TD) children and are particularly prevalent in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, both the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and the pattern of verb-marking deficit in DLD vary across languages and interact with the semantic and syntactic properties of the language being learned. In this paper, we review work…

  • Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development

    Open AccessSamantha Durrant, Andrew Jessop et al.ARTICLELanguage and Cognition2021

    By the end of their first year, infants can interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. Infants of this age are also in the early stages of vocabulary development, producing their first words at around 12 months. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants’ ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes, and whe…

  • Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions

    Open AccessAmy Bidgood, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage and Cognition2021

    We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., * You giggled me ). Experiment 1 investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 2 used syntactic priming to elicit overgeneralisation e…

  • Exploring the acquisition of verb inflections in Japanese

    Open AccessTomoko Tatsumi, Franklin Chang et al.ARTICLEFirst Language2021

    The acquisition of verb morphology is often studied using categorical criteria for determining the productivity of a morpheme. Applying this approach to Japanese, an agglutinative language, this study finds no consistent order for morpheme acquisition and that productivity could be explained by sampling effects. To examine morpheme acquisition using more graded measures of productivity, the authors compared various regression models for predictin…

  • Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development

    Open AccessRebecca L A Frost, Andrew Jessop et al.ARTICLECognitive Psychology2020

    To acquire language, infants must learn how to identify words and linguistic structure in speech. Statistical learning has been suggested to assist both of these tasks. However, infants' capacity to use statistics to discover words and structure together remains unclear. Further, it is not yet known how infants' statistical learning ability relates to their language development. We trained 17-month-old infants on an artificial language comprising…

  • Testing an input-based account of children's errors with inflectional morphology

    Open AccessTomoko Tatsumi, Ben Ambridge et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system, which shows substantial by-verb variation in the frequency distribution of past and nonpast forms. 22 chi…

  • The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology

    Open AccessEgle Saviciute, Ben Ambridge et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    Four- and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the target form, and with the phonological neighbourhood density of the noun. Second, the error patterns wer…

  • Comparing generativist and constructivist accounts of the use of the past tense form in early child Japanese

    Open AccessTomoko Tatsumi, Julian M PineARTICLEJournal of Child Language2016

    The present study investigated children's early use of verb inflection in Japanese by comparing a generativist account, which predicts that the past tense will have a special default-like status for the child during the early stages, with a constructivist input-driven account, which assumes that children's acquisition and use of inflectional forms reflects verb-specific distributional patterns in their input. Analysis of naturalistic data from fo…

  • Explanatory adequacy is not enough

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage2015Cited by: 1

    In this response to commentators on our target article ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn’t help’, we argue that the fatal flaw in most UG-based approaches to acquisition is their focus on describing the adult end-state in terms of a particular linguistic formalism. As a consequence, such accounts typically neglect to link acquisition to the language that the learner actually hears, instead assuming that she is able, by mean…

  • Infinitives or bare stems? Are English-speaking children defaulting to the highest-frequency form

    Open AccessSANNA HEINI MARIA RÄSÄNEN, Ben Ambridge et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2014

    Young English-speaking children often produce utterances with missing 3sg - s (e.g., * He play ). Since the mid 1990s, such errors have tended to be treated as Optional Infinitive (OI) errors, in which the verb is a non-finite form (e.g., Wexler, 1998; Legate & Yang, 2007). The present article reports the results of a cross-sectional elicited-production study with 22 children (aged 3;1–4;1), which investigated the possibility that at least some a…

  • Child language acquisition

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLELanguage2014Cited by: 4

    In many different domains of language acquisition, there exists an apparent learnability problem to which innate knowledge of some aspect of universal grammar (UG) has been proposed as a solution. The present article reviews these proposals in the core domains of (i) identifying syntactic categories, (ii) acquiring basic morphosyntax, (iii) structure dependence, (iv) subjacency, and (v) the binding principles. We conclude that, in each of these d…

  • The development of abstract syntax

    Open AccessCaroline F Rowland, Franklin Chang et al.ARTICLECognition2012

    Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by taking a developmental approach to structural priming. Using a dialog comprehension-to-production paradi…

  • The roles of verb semantics, entrenchment, and morphophonology in the retreat from dative argument-structure overgeneralization errors

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Caroline F Rowland et al.ARTICLELanguage2012Cited by: 6References: 1

    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 ag…

  • Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLECognitive Linguistics2011Cited by: 3References: 6

    Whilst certain verbs may appear in both the intransitive inchoative and the transitive causative constructions ( The ball rolled/The man rolled the ball ), others may appear in only the former ( The man laughed/*The joke laughed the man ). Some accounts argue that children acquire these restrictions using only (or mainly) statistical learning mechanisms such as entrenchment and pre-emption. Others have argued that verb semantics are also importan…

  • Explaining quantitative variation in the rate of Optional Infinitive errors across languages

    Open AccessDaniel Freudenthal, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2010

    In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors across five different languages (English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish). We then differentiate b…

  • The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children’s and adults’ graded judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors

    Open AccessBen Ambridge, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLECognition2008

  • Tense over time

    Open AccessJulian M Pine, Gina Conti-Ramsden et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2008

    The Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM) predicts that English-speaking children will show similar patterns of provision across different tense-marking morphemes (Rice, Wexler & Hershberger, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test this prediction by examining provision rates for third person singular present tense and first and third person singular forms of copula BE and auxiliary BE in longitudinal data from eleven English-speaking chi…

  • Understanding the developmental dynamics of subject omission

    Open AccessDaniel Freudenthal, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2007

    P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to assume full competence. We extended P. Bloom’s study by using a larger sample (12 children) and measuring…

  • Note of clarification on the coding of light verbs in ‘Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax’ (Journal of Child Language 31, 61–99)

    Open AccessA L Theakston, Elena Lieven et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2006

    In our recent paper, ‘Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax’ ( Journal of Child Language 31 , 61–99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high frequency in the language to which children are exposed. We adopted two different categorization schemes…

  • Investigating the abstractness of children's early knowledge of argument structure

    Open AccessKATHLEEN MCCLURE, Julian M Pine et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2006

    In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop ‘weak’ or ‘partial’ representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around verbs in Tomasello's (1992) case study of Travis, with those of 10 children (Stage I–II) in a year-length…