Browse Abstracts 2018
Use the schedule grid below to browse abstracts from this year’s Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday
| 6:30 | STUDENT WORKSHOP (East Balcony) “How to integrate open science into language acquisition research” Christina Bergmann (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) |
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| 9am-5pm | BOOK EXHIBIT (Ziskind Lounge) Cascadilla Press Cambridge University Press John Benjamins Publishing Company MIT Press |
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| 10:30 | BREAK (Ziskind Lounge) | ||
| 12:30 | LUNCH BREAK (Ziskind Lounge) NIH/NSF FUNDING SYMPOSIUM (Metcalf Large) |
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| Session A (East Balcony) | Session B (Conference Auditorium) | Session C (Terrace Lounge) | |
| 2:00 | Using prosody to compute alternative sets: The case of Turkish particle dA S. Topaloglu, M. Nakipoglu |
Individual-outcome corpus modeling to constrain parameters of statistical learning models A. Buerkin-Pontrelli, J. Coffey, D. Swingley |
Learnability in Romance: How indirect input helps children acquire the contrast between null and overt subjects H. Forsythe, C. Schmitt, D. Greeson |
| 2:30 | Understanding prosodic and syntactic focus by Mandarin and German five-year-olds: Evidence from eye-tracking studies H. Chen, B. Höhle, S. Crain |
A rhythm account of word segmentation tasks F. Wang, J. Trueswell, J. Zevin, T. Mintz |
Doing what you must: Child actuality inferences in modal comprehension D. Veselinovic, A. Cournane |
| 3:00 | ATTENDED POSTER SESSION I (Metcalf Small) | ||
| 5:45 | DINNER BREAK | ||
| 7:45 | KEYNOTE ADDRESS (Metcalf Large) | ||
| Ann Senghas (Barnard College) | |||
| 9am-5pm | BOOK EXHIBIT (Ziskind Lounge) Cascadilla Press Cambridge University Press John Benjamins Publishing Company MIT Press |
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| 10:30 | BREAK (Ziskind Lounge) | ||
| Session A (East Balcony) | Session B (Conference Auditorium) | Session C (Terrace Lounge) | |
| 11:00 | The lexical advantage: Four-year-old children acquire words, not sounds M. Cychosz, M. Erskine, J. Edwards |
Language modality doesn’t affect number concept development, but timing of language exposure does: Insights from deaf children acquiring signed and spoken language J. Contreras, E. Carrigan, A. Shusterman, M. Coppola |
On a developmental delay in the L1 acquisition of the Japanese nominative object T. Sano, H. Shimada, Y. Fujiwara |
| 11:30 | The acquisition of Mandarin tonal processes by children with cochlear implants P. Tang, I. Yuen, N. Xu Rattanasone, L. Gao, K. Demuth |
If they had been more transparent, the child would have discovered them more easily: How counterfactuals develop L. Rouvoli, V. Tsakali, N. Kazanina |
Reflexives and word order in adult and child Tagalog I. Bondoc, K. Deen, E. Or |
| 12:15 | SATURDAY SYMPOSIUM (Metcalf Large): “A developmental, individual-differences perspective on processing of and learning from accented speech” |
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| Toddlers’ accommodation of accent: Acoustic and experiential factors Rochelle Newman (University of Maryland) |
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| Effects of bilingualism on children’s processing of accented speech Margarita Kaushanskaya (University of Wisconsin – Madison) |
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| Individual differences in perception of non-native speech Melissa Baese-Berk (University of Oregon) |
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| Session A (East Balcony) | Session B (Conference Auditorium) | Session C (Terrace Lounge) | |
| 2:15 | Won’t somebody think of the children? Beyond maximality with plural definite descriptions M. Moyer, Z. Husnain, K. Syrett |
Beyond words: Children apply the principle of informativeness to non-linguistic symbols A. Kampa, A. Papafragou |
Beyond linear non-adjacent or adjacent dependencies: Infants track hierarchical syntactic dependencies C. Legrand, R. Shi |
| 2:45 | A cross-linguistic investigation of symmetrical judgments K. Drozd, D. Anđjelković, M. Savić, et al.* |
Use of contrastive inference for reference resolution of a novel word in monolingual and bilingually exposed children I. Lorge, N. Katsos |
The more the merrier? The impact of talker variability on artificial grammar learning in preschoolers and adults F. Bulgarelli, D. Weiss |
| 3:15 | ATTENDED POSTER SESSION II (Metcalf Small) | ||
| Session A (East Balcony) | Session B (Conference Auditorium) | Session C (Terrace Lounge) | |
| 4:30 | Rhythmic and morphosyntactic predictions: The anticipation skills of Italian children with developmental dyslexia V. Persici, N. Stucchi, F. Arosio |
Using television to boost native-speaker input for L2-learning children: A cautionary tale T. Sorenson Duncan, J. Paradis |
Intervention and animacy effects in the acquisition of sluicing and relative clauses V. Mateu, N. Hyams |
| 5:00 | The pitfalls of strong predictions: Learning new words from discourse H. Rabagliati, N. Wolf, B. Skarabela, H. Rohde |
Language input varies by activity and social context in Latino infants from Spanish-speaking homes A. Weisleder, A. Mendelsohn, A. Villanueva, A. Seery, C. Canfield |
Pulling the curtain back: Wh-questions in child Tok Pisin H. Sato, K. Deen |
| 5:45 | PLENARY ADDRESS (Metcalf Large) | ||
| Johanne Paradis (University of Alberta) | |||
| 7:00 | RECEPTION (Ziskind Lounge) | ||
| 10:30 | BREAK (Ziskind Lounge) | ||
| 11:00 | SUNDAY SYMPOSIUM (Metcalf Large): “Addressing the putative ‘word gap’: Approaches to early language interventions” |
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| Helping children learn language: Why bother? Roberta M. Golinkoff (University of Delaware) & Kathy Hirsh-Pasek (Temple University) |
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| Pointing to success: A home-based intervention for parents of infants Meredith L. Rowe (Harvard University Graduate School of Education) |
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| The Duet Project: A community-based home-visiting partnership Rebecca M. Alper (Temple University) |
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| The FACT Project: A school-based program for elementary-age families Rachel R. Romeo (Boston Children’s Hospital & Massachusetts Institute of Technology) |
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*Complete list of authors: K. Drozd, D. Anᵭjelković, M. Savić, O. Toškovic, A. Gavarró, A. Lite, G. Hržica, M. Kovačević, J. Kuvač Kraljević, A. Skordi, K. Jensen de Lopez, L. Sundahl, A. van Hout, B. Hollebrandse, M. van Koert, E. Fabre, A. Hubert, I Noveck, S. Ott, K. Yatsushiro, I. Balčiūnienė, J. Ruzaitė, M. Vija, D. Gatt, H. Grech, E. Haman, D. Kiebzak-Mandera, A. Miękisz, N. Gagarina, J. Puzanova, M. Popović, S. Kapalova, D. Slančová, N. Smith, U. Sauerland, H. van der Lely
Alternates
N. Boll-Avetisyan, S. Van Ommen, T. Nazzi, B. Höhle: Categorical perception of lexical stress in French L2 learners of German: Effects of musical acuity
R. Feiman, D. Barner: The acquisition of quantifiers: The universality and distributivity of each
S. Floyd, C. Lew-Williams, A. Goldberg: Early word meanings are structured around similarity: Evidence from lexical processing
Y. Fujiwara, H. Shimada: Acquisition of ellipsis: Phonology or syntax?
H. Hwang, R. Mazuka, M. Takada: Enhancement of stop contrast or emergence of new targets? Implications on language development in Japanese
A. Ohba, T. Sano, K. Yamakoshi: Children’s acquisition of clefts revisited: New evidence from child Japanese
Z. Ovans, J. Novick, Y. Huang: Better to be reliable than early: Cognitive-control effects on developmental parsing
S. Tal, I. Arnon, M. Ariel: Children’s task-related comprehension of or
B. Zurer Pearson, J. Jackson: Acquisition of a late-developing syntactic structure by African-American-English-speaking learners of the mainstream dialect
A. Ahmad: Maximality before uniqueness: Children’s acquisition of definite descriptions in French
B. Axel, N. Havron, I. Dautriche, A. de Carvalho, A. Christophe: When predictions fail: Adults and children stop predicting upcoming syntactic categories in unreliable contexts
A. Bates, L. Pearl: What input gap is there across socioeconomic status for complex syntax? A quantitative and cognitive modeling analysis of linguistic evidence for learning syntactic islands
I. Berent, G. Sandoboe, M. Platt: How we reason about innateness
S. Bjoernsdottir, S. Sigurjonsdottir: Predicting gender assignment in the acquisition of Icelandic
M. Bohn, M. Tessler, M. Frank: Modeling the role of common ground in pragmatic word learning
A. Borovsky, R. Peters: Building lexico-semantic networks impacts early word recognition
A. Bosnic, J. Spenader: Stages in acquiring distributive markers in Serbian and Dutch: Evidence from an act-out task
K. Byers-Heinlein, E. Fourakis, C. Lew-Williams: Language mixing affects bilingual toddlers’ word learning
M. Carbajal, S. Peperkamp: An exploration of language input and its impact on vocabulary development in bilingual infants
J. Choe: Effect of NP type on L2 raising acquisition
A. Chromá, F. Smolík: Language, personal pronouns, and social understanding from two to three: A longitudinal study in children acquiring Czech
C. Contemori, O. Asiri: Anaphora resolution in English L2 learners: An analysis of different discourse contexts
A. Cournane, A. Pérez-Leroux: Leaving obligations behind: Epistemic incrementation in preschool English
E. Daskalaki, E. Blom, V. Chondrogianni, J. Paradis: Effects of parental input quality in child heritage language acquisition
B. Davies, N. Xu Rattanasone, K. Demuth: Acquisition of plural morphology by preschoolers with hearing loss
L. Dekydtspotter, K. Miller, M. Iverson, Y. Xiong, K. Swanson, C. Gilbert: Increased beta-band activity in the active maintenance of fragile L2 representations
L. Ehrenhofer, K. Yatsushiro, T. Fritzsche, B. Höhle, J. Lidz, C. Phillips, Y. Huang: Verbs, not subjects, drive subject-as-agent misinterpretation in children’s comprehension of passives
J. Grinstead, M. Oates, M. Nieves-Rivera, R. Padilla-Reyes: Quantifier relationships in the lexicon: Scalar competence and performance
S. Guven, E. Thordardottir, E. Rioux: Examining task related effects on the manifestation of morphological errors in French speaking children with Specific Language Impairment
M. Hoareau, H. Yeung, T. Nazzi: Early parental input, production skills and TP-based word segmentation
Z. Hopkins, L. Lindsay, H. Branigan: What makes a house a home? Mechanisms of lexical alignment in preschoolers’ referential communication
A. Irani: How children learn to disappear causative errors using positive evidence
E. Kistanova, I. Sekerina: Acquisition of the grammatical categories of Russian verbs in a heritage Russian-English child: A case study
J. Kolak, S. Granlund, F. Engelmann, M. Szreder, B. Ambridge, J. Pine, A. Theakston, E. Lieven: Children’s acquisition of person/number verb inflection in morphologically complex languages
V. Kozloff, A. Nguyen, J. Arciuli, Z. Qi: Statistical learning at noisy environment is associated with vocabulary
O. Lavi-Rotbain, I. Arnon: Frequency or predictability? The effect of entropy on statistical learning in children and adults
M. Lei: The acquisition of cardinal and ordinal numbers in Cantonese
N. Lester, F. Moscoso del Prado Martin: Syntactic distributions affect the emergence of nouns in the earliest stages of syntactic acquisition
D. Lillo-Martin, D. Chen Pichler: Development of pointing signs in ASL and implications for their analysis
V. Limia, S. Ozcaliskan, E. Hoff, E. Alcantar, M. Ortiz, C. Chamorro: Do parents gesture differently to their bilingual children when speaking their dominant vs. weaker language?
W. Ling, T. Grüter: Lexical tone in L2 Mandarin: The relation between categorical perception and real-time spoken word recognition
Y. Lu, T. Lee: Telicity and objecthood in the acquisition of unaccusativity: Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of manner-of-motion verbs
M. Ma, Y. Oshima-Takane, Y. Kayama: Understanding language-specific anaphora in children
W. Ma, P. Zhou: Deciding the referent of a new word: The acquisition of classifiers
D. Miller, J. Rothman: You win some and you lose some: Processing and judgment of scalar implicatures within attrition contexts
A. Mills, A. van Hout: Cognitive bias overrides syntactic bootstrapping in novel verb learning
N. Mitrofanova, Y. Rodina, O. Urek, M. Westergaard: Sensitivity to grammatical gender cues in the acquisition of heritage Russian
E. Nguyen, L. Pearl: Using developmental modeling to specify learning and representation of the passive in English children
S. Ozcaliskan, S. Goldin-Meadow: How early does speaking shape the native language of gesture?
D. Panizza, M. Thalmann: Present to the eye, away from the mind: Dissociating online comprehension and offline judgments of indirect scalar inferences
A. Pérez-Leroux, A. Castilla-Earls, M. Lara Díaz, E. Pettibone: Recursion follows productivity, not vice versa: The case of Spanish NP recursion
E. Peristeri, E. Baldimtsi, S. Durrleman, I. Tsimpli: Bilingualism effects in children with Specific Language Impairment: Metalinguistic awareness, executive functions and false-belief reasoning
L. Perkins, T. Knowlton, A. Williams, J. Lidz: Matching number vs. linking roles: Using 3-participant scene percepts to understand infants’ bootstrapping
E. Puig-Mayenco, J. Rothman: Low proficiency does not mean ab initio: Exposure matters for L3 transfer studies
T. Schatz, N. Feldman, S. Goldwater, E. Dupoux: Phonetic learning without phonetic categories
B. Skarabela, E. Pool, M. Ota: ‘The train goes choo-choo’: A corpus analysis of the role of onomatopoeic words in early production
A. Starr, M. Srinivasan: Do spatial metaphors facilitate word learning?
M. Sundara, C. Mayer: Modeling developmental changes in infants’ discrimination of English vowels
S. Tong, Y. Chan: Musical experience enhances both pitch perception and non-native tonal word learning in children and adults
S. Tsuji, R. Mazuka, D. Swingley: Temporal contingency augments attention to a referent in a word learning task
A. van Dooren, M. Tulling, A. Cournane, V. Hacquard: Lexical aspect as a crosslinguistic cue to modal meaning: Evidence from Dutch
M. Wu, T. Ionin: L1-Chinese L2-English speakers’ acquisition of English quantifier-negation scope
K. Yatsushiro, A. Sugawara, U. Sauerland: Effect of intonation contour on scope: hat vs. neutral contours in German
T. Zamuner, K. Boyce: The development of the production effect in children aged 3 to 6 years old
N. Adricula: Children’s acquisition of polysemy: by, of, and with in child English
E. Bergelson, A. Weisleder, J. Bunce, C. Rowland, M. Casillas, A. Cristia: How different is speech input and output across subgroups? First results from >12,000 hours of naturalistic recordings
N. Boll-Avetisyan, S. Van Ommen, T. Nazzi, B. Höhle: Categorical perception of lexical stress in French L2 learners of German: Effects of musical acuity
J. Cabrelli Amaro, C. Pichan, J. Rothman, L. Serratrice: Initial phonological and morphosyntactic transfer in L3 Italian by early English/Spanish bilinguals
M. Casillas: How much speech do Tseltal Mayan children hear? Daylong averages and interactional bursts
A. Chaouch Orozco, J. González Alonso, J. Rothman: Exploring the L1-L2 versus L2-L1 (masked) priming asymmetry effect
E. Davis, B. Landau: Does see that help children learn think that? The intersection of perception and mental verbs in development
L. de Ruiter, A. Theakston, E. Lieven, M. Hilton, S. Brandt: Is before easier than after in German, too? Testing the relative influence of iconicity, ambiguity, and language-specific frequencies on the processing of adverbial sentences in German
Ö. Demir-Lira, J. Kanero, C. Oranç, S. Koşkulu, I. Franko, O. Uluşahin, Z. Adıgüzel, T. Göksun: Using gestures in L2 vocabulary teaching: Human or robot tutors?
A. Dieuleveut, A. van Dooren, A. Cournane, V. Hacquard: Learning the force of modals: Sig you guess what sig means?
R. Feiman, D. Barner: The acquisition of quantifiers: The universality and distributivity of each
A. Fitch, S. Arunachalam, A. Lieberman: Learning words from context in ASL: Evidence from a Human Simulation Paradigm
S. Floyd, C. Lew-Williams, A. Goldberg: Early word meanings are structured around similarity: Evidence from lexical processing
Y. Fujiwara, H. Shimada: Acquisition of ellipsis: Phonology or syntax?
D. Gagne, S. Goico, J. Pyers, M. Coppola: False belief understanding requires language experience, but its precursor abilities do not
H. Getz, E. Newport: Privileged computations for closed-class items
C. Goodwin, L. Prunier, D. Lillo-Martin: Parental sign input to Deaf children of Deaf parents: Vocabulary and syntax
S. Granlund, J. Kolak, V. Vihman, F. Engelmann, B. Ambridge, J. Pine, A. Theakston, E. Lieven: A cross-linguistic study on the development of noun case marking in morphologically complex languages
M. Gross, M. Kaushanskaya: Predictors of language control in bilingual children with low and typical language
V. Hacquard, R. Dudley, J. Lidz: With or without “too”: Reasoning about people’s questions and their presuppositions
K. Hitczenko, R. Mazuka, M. Elsner, N. Feldman: Normalization may be ineffective for phonetic category learning
H. Huang, S. Crain: When OR is assigned a conjunctive inference in child language
H. Hwang, R. Mazuka, M. Takada: Enhancement of stop contrast or emergence of new targets? Implications on language development in Japanese
E. Jimenez, E. Haebig, T. Hills: Deviant vocabulary development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
A. Kholodova, M. Peter, C. Rowland, S. Allen: Implicit learning and surprisal effects in a structurally biased language: A developmental study
J. Kotfila, J. de Villiers: When must children acquire long distance Wh extraction?
E. Koulaguina, G. Legendre, I. Barrière, I. Menu, E. Sivakumar, T. Nazzi: Suffixal subject-verb number agreement: The development of comprehension in French-learning toddlers from 30 to 36 months
S. Lima: Acquisition of conjunctions in recursive and distributive scenarios: A production study in Yudja
L. Lindsay, H. Branigan, H. Rabagliati: Catching your eye: Low-level perceptual cues influence preschoolers’ sentence formulation
C. Manetti, C. Contemori: The production of object relative clauses in Italian-speaking children: A syntactic priming study
Š. Matějka, F. Smolík: The validity of a parental-report measure for grammar assessment: Acquisition of verb and noun forms in Czech
B. McMillan, L. Masek, S. Paterson, A. Ribner, K. Hirsh-Pasek, C. Blair: Early attention influences language development through parent-child interactions
N. Meir, R. Bazes, M. Hartston, R. Novogrodsky: Theory of mind and pronoun use in bilingual and monolingual children with autism
K. Miller, K. Moors: Building anticipation in real-time L2 processing: The use of grammatical gender in L2 French
K. Montemurro, M. Flaherty, M. Coppola, S. Goldin-Meadow, D. Brentari: Grammaticalization of the body and space in Nicaraguan Sign Language
S. Moran, S. Stoll: Variation sets in maximally diverse languages
C. Nakamura, J. Harris, S. Jun, Y. Hirose: L2 adaptation to unreliable prosody during structural analysis: A visual world study
L. Nishibayashi, R. Mazuka: Early consonant bias in recognizing segmented word forms in Japanese-learning infants
A. Ohba, T. Sano, K. Yamakoshi: Children’s acquisition of clefts revisited: New evidence from child Japanese
T. Okuma: Acquisition of floating quantifiers by L1 English speakers of L2 Japanese
Y. Oshima-Takane, K. Boyle: Toddlers’ use of a third party’s gaze information in verb-action mapping
Z. Ovans, J. Novick, Y. Huang: Better to be reliable than early: Cognitive-control effects on developmental parsing
D. Perszyk, S. Waxman: A language-specific processing system supports infants’ language-cognition link
Z. Qi, A. Nguyen, O. Ozernov-Palchik, S. Beach, S. May, J. Arciuli, J. Gabrieli: Statistical learning in reading development and reading impairment
A. Santos, A. Jesus, S. Abalada: How do children interpret novel control verbs?
H. Shimada, A. Ohba, R. Okada, K. Yamakoshi: The anti-reconstruction property of cleft constructions in child Japanese
S. Simackova, K. Chladkova: Distributional learning is constrained by prior language experience
F. Smolík: The status of the SVO word order in Czech children’s productions
M. Stegenwallner-Schütz, F. Adani: Number marking helps children with and without Specific Language Impairment alleviate their difficulties with case marking alone: Evidence from object-initial sentences in German
Y. Su, L. Naigles: Syntactic strength of the SVO word order in the general population of Mandarin-exposed preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
S. Tal, I. Arnon, M. Ariel: Children’s task-related comprehension of or
M. Talbott, J. Munson, G. Young, A. Estes, S. Rogers: Developmental sequence of gesture and expressive language milestone achievement in toddlers with ASD
K. Tamasi, Q. Yow: Early onset of bilingualism and frequent language switching confers advantage in executive functioning: A study of two bilingual populations
Z. Wang, X. Yang, R. Shi: Acquisition of unaccusativity in toddlers
J. Zhu, A. Gavarró: Early comprehension of canonical and non-canonical word orders in Mandarin
B. Zurer Pearson, J. Jackson: Acquisition of a late-developing syntactic structure by African-American-English-speaking learners of the mainstream dialect