Caroline F Rowland
Biographic Data
| ID | 799204 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caroline F Rowland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caroline F |
| FAMILY NAME | Rowland |
| SIGNATURE | ROWLAND C F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8675-8669 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Quantifier-Specific Usage Patterns Shape Learning—A Corpus Analysis on Universal Quantifiers in English and Dutch Child-Directed Language
Quantifiers specify semantic relations between sentence constituents. Due to their abstract meanings, they form a learning challenge for children. This challenge is made more difficult by the fact that different universal quantifiers instantiate slightly different meanings. We investigated what evidence is available in the input that might help children learn the meaning of universal quantifiers by exploring the use of these words in naturalistic…
How bilingualism influences language processing in the developing brain: A systematic review of the neurobiological evidence
Early immersive bilinguals develop like monolinguals, but neural responses differ. • Early bilingual experience shapes brain structures and functions. • Neural adaptation correlates with L2 learning experience, proficiency and exposure. • Bilinguals match monolinguals’ executive function via additional neural recruitment. Growing up bilingual has a remarkable influence on language processing and brain development in children, yet a systematic neu…
Encouraging use of complex language in preschoolers: A classroom-based storybook intervention study
Preschoolers’ exposure to abstract language (i.e. talk beyond the here and now) during shared reading is associated with language development. This randomized intervention study tested whether preschoolers’ repeated exposure to simple and complex stories (as defined by the inferential demands of the story), and the extratextual talk associated with such stories, would lead to differences in language production during shared reading and to differe…
Language acquisition occurs in multimodal social interaction: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek
We argue that language learning occurs in triadic interactions, where caregivers and children engage not only with each other but also with objects, actions and non-verbal cues that shape language acquisition. We illustrate this using two studies on real-time interactions in spoken and signed language. The first examines shared book reading, showing how caregivers use speech, gestures and gaze coordination to establish joint attention, facilitati…
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…
Simulating the Relationship Between Nonword Repetition Performance and Vocabulary Growth in 2-Year-Olds: Evidence From the Language 0-5 Project
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…
Establishing the reliability of metrics extracted from long-form recordings using Lena and the Aclew pipeline
Long-form audio recordings are increasingly used to study individual variation, group differences, and many other topics in theoretical and applied fields of developmental science, particularly for the description of children's language input (typically speech from adults) and children's language output (ranging from babble to sentences). The proprietary LENA software has been available for over a decade, and with it, users have come to rely on d…
Learning to generalise but not segment an artificial language at 17 months predicts children’s language skills 3 years later
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…
Children’s engagement and caregivers’ use of language-boosting strategies during shared book reading: A mixed methods approach
For shared book reading to be effective for language development, the adult and child need to be highly engaged. The current paper adopted a mixed-methods approach to investigate caregiver’s language-boosting behaviours and children’s engagement during shared book reading. The results revealed there were more instances of joint attention and caregiver’s use of prompts during moments of higher engagement. However, instances of most language-boosti…
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 …
Contributions of Abstract Extratextual Talk and Interactive Style to Preschoolers’ Vocabulary Development
Caregiver abstract talk during shared reading predicts preschool-age children’s vocabulary development. However, previous research has focused on level of abstraction with less consideration of the style of extratextual talk. Here, we investigated the relation between these two dimensions of extratextual talk, and their contributions to variance in children’s vocabulary skills. Caregiver level of abstraction was associated with an interactive rea…
Towards Diversifying Early Language Development Research: First Truly Global International Summer/ Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/) 2021
A survey of diversity in leading language acquisition journals revealed that only 2% of the 7,000+ languages of the world are represented. With a long-term aim of empowering researchers everywhere to contribute to this literature, we organized the First Truly Global /L+/ International Summer/Winter School on Language Acquisition (/L+/). /L+/ was a free 5-day virtual school that facilitated the interchange of expertise among early career researche…
Priming and the Lexical Boost Effect across Development in a Structurally Biased Language
The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different age groups (3-4 years, 5-6 years, 7-8 years) and adults with double object datives (Dora sent Boots the rabbit) or prepositional object datives (Dora sent the rabbit to Boots). Importantly, the prepositional obje…
Everyday language input and production in 1001 children from 6 continents
Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival1,2. And yet, language is variable across individuals. Behavioral and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status3, children’s gender4, and multilingualism5. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here we leverage speech tech…
Does the understanding of complex dynamic events at 10 months predict vocabulary development
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: Grammaticality judgments and production priming
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…
Chunks of phonological knowledge play a significant role in children’s word learning and explain effects of neighborhood size, phonotactic probability, word frequency and word length
Covid-19 first lockdown as a window into language acquisition: Associations between caregiver-child activities and vocabulary gains
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 1…
Teaching the unlearnable: A training study of complex yes/no questions
A central question in language acquisition is how children master sentence types that they have seldom, if ever, heard. Here we report the findings of a pre-registered, randomised, single-blind intervention study designed to test the prediction that, for one such sentence type, complex questions (e.g., Is the crocodile who’s hot eating? ), children could combine schemas learned, on the basis of the input, for complex noun phrases ( the [THING] wh…
Evaluating the Effectiveness of a ‘Real‐World' Shared Reading Intervention for Preschool Children and Their Families: A Randomised Controlled Trial
Background Shared reading interventions can impact positively on preschool children's language development and on their caregiver's attitudes/behaviours towards reading. However, a number of barriers may discourage families from engaging with these interventions, particularly families from lower socio‐economic status (SES) backgrounds. We investigated how families from such backgrounds responded to an intervention designed explicitly to overcome …
Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development
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…
Story choice matters for caregiver extra-textual talk during shared reading with preschoolers
This study aimed to examine the influence of the complexity of the story-book on caregiver extra-textual talk (i.e., interactions beyond text reading) during shared reading with preschool-age children. Fifty-three mother–child dyads (3;00–4;11) were video-recorded sharing two ostensibly similar picture-books: a simple story (containing no false belief) and a complex story (containing a false belief central to the plot, which provided content that…
Can inferencing be trained in preschoolers using shared book-reading? A randomised controlled trial of parents’ inference-eliciting questions on oral inferencing ability
The ability to make inferences is essential for effective language comprehension. While inferencing training benefits reading comprehension in school-aged children (see Elleman, 2017, for a review), we do not yet know whether it is beneficial to support the development of these skills prior to school entry. In a pre-registered randomised controlled trial, we evaluated the efficacy of a parent-delivered intervention intended to promote four-year-o…
A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lena) system
The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the ki…
The acquisition of auxiliary syntax: BE and Have
This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children between the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for auxiliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns of auxiliary use in the input—were examined. The data suggest that although none of these accounts pr…
The roles of verb semantics, entrenchment, and morphophonology in the retreat from dative argument-structure overgeneralization errors
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…
Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category
In this study data from the first six months of 12 children's multiword speech were used to test the validity of Valians (1991) syntactic performance-limitation account andTomasello's (1992) verb-island account of early multiword speech with particular reference to the development of the English verb category.The results provide evidence for appropriate use of verb morphology, auxiliary verb structures, pronoun case marking, and SVO word order fr…
Combining Language Corpora With Experimental and Computational Approaches for Language Acquisition Research
Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language exposure has revolutionized the field. New techniques enable more precise measurements of children's act…
Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors: A novel verb grammaticality judgment study
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…
Monotheists All
Priming and the Lexical Boost Effect across Development in a Structurally Biased Language
The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of abstract representations for syntactic structures in children. In a structural priming experiment on the dative alternation in German, we primed children from three different age groups (3-4 years, 5-6 years, 7-8 years) and adults with double object datives (Dora sent Boots the rabbit) or prepositional object datives (Dora sent the rabbit to Boots). Importantly, the prepositional obje…
Predicting children's errors with negative questions: Testing a schema-combination account
Positive and negative what, why and yes/no questions with the 3sg auxiliaries can and does were elicited from 50 children aged 3;3–4;3. In support of the constructivist “schema-combination” account, only children who produced a particular positive question type correctly (e.g., What does she want?) produced a characteristic “auxiliary-doubling” error (e.g., *What does she doesn't want?) for the corresponding negative question type. This suggests …
Observational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition: What do they mean
Observational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition have both recently been used to look at the absolute proportion of nouns in children's early vocabularies. However, they have tended to generate rather different results. The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between such measures in a sample of 26 children between 1;1 and 2;1 at approximately 50 and 100 words. The results show that although observational and…
Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category
In this study data from the first six months of 12 children's multiword speech were used to test the validity of Valians (1991) syntactic performance-limitation account andTomasello's (1992) verb-island account of early multiword speech with particular reference to the development of the English verb category.The results provide evidence for appropriate use of verb morphology, auxiliary verb structures, pronoun case marking, and SVO word order fr…
Subject–auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: ‘What Children Do Know?’
The present paper reports an analysis of correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in one child's early wh-question data (age 2;3.4 to 4;10.23). It is argued that two current movement rule accounts (DeVilliers, 1991; Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) cannot explain the patterning of early wh-questions. However, the data can be explained in terms of the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word + auxil…
The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb-argument structure: An alternative account
This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive verb utterances early in development in comparison wi…
Monotheists All
Going, going, gone: The acquisition of the verb ‘go’
This study investigated different accounts of early argument structure acquisition and verb paradigm building through the detailed examination of the acquisition of the verb Go . Data from 11 children followed longitudinally between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0 were examined. Children's uses of the different forms of Go were compared with respect to syntactic structure and the semantics encoded. The data are compatible with the suggestion that the chi…
Determinants of acquisition order in wh-questions: Re-evaluating the role of caregiver speech
Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic fu…
The development of inversion in wh-questions: A reply to Van Valin
Van Valin ( Journal of Child Language 29 , 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine ( Journal of Child Language 27 , 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language , Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the …
Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax
In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexical items. The present study evaluates the relative i…
Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model: Why the data on children's use of non-nominative 3psg subjects count against the Atom
One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schütze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present study tests this prediction on data from 12 children between the ages of 1;8.22 and 3;0.10. This is done,…
The acquisition of auxiliary syntax: BE and Have
This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children between the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for auxiliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns of auxiliary use in the input—were examined. The data suggest that although none of these accounts pr…
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)
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…
Comparing different accounts of inversion errors in children's non-subject wh-questions: ‘What experimental data can tell us?’
This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words ( what, who, how and why ), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6–4;6. Rates of non-inversion error ( Who she is hitting? ) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxiliary or number alone, but by lexical auxiliary subtype and by wh-word+lexical auxiliary combin…
The effect of sampling on estimates of lexical specificity and error rates
Studies based on naturalistic data are a core tool in the field of language acquisition research and have provided thorough descriptions of children's speech. However, these descriptions are inevitably confounded by differences in the relative frequency with which children use words and language structures. The purpose of the present work was to investigate the impact of sampling constraints on estimates of the productivity of children's utteranc…
The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children’s and adults’ graded judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors
Predicting children's errors with negative questions: Testing a schema-combination account
Positive and negative what, why and yes/no questions with the 3sg auxiliaries can and does were elicited from 50 children aged 3;3–4;3. In support of the constructivist “schema-combination” account, only children who produced a particular positive question type correctly (e.g., What does she want?) produced a characteristic “auxiliary-doubling” error (e.g., *What does she doesn't want?) for the corresponding negative question type. This suggests …
The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies
A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the ki…
Children use verb semantics to retreat from overgeneralization errors: A novel verb grammaticality judgment study
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…
The development of abstract syntax: Evidence from structural priming and the lexical boost
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
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…
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…
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Combining Language Corpora With Experimental and Computational Approaches for Language Acquisition Research
Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language exposure has revolutionized the field. New techniques enable more precise measurements of children's act…
The principles of scientific inquiry
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A thorough evaluation of the Language Environment Analysis (Lenatm) system
In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving thousands of children across several research disciplines have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis called the LENA^®^ system, which aims to assess children's language environment. While the system's prevalence in the language acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation efforts, on only some of its key characteristics. H…
Psychology (46 works) · Language Development and Disorders (45 works) · Linguistics (38 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (34 works) · Computer Science (33 works) · Language acquisition (22 works) · Artificial Intelligence (17 works) · Cognitive psychology (16 works) · Developmental psychology (16 works) · Mathematics education (16 works)