Caroline F Rowland

• PhD
• Professor at University of Liverpool

There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that executive function (EF) abilities are positively associated with language development during the preschool years, such that children with good executive functions also have larger vocabularies. However, why this is the case remains to be discovered. In this study, we focused on the hypothesis that se...

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 c...

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 caregi...

There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that executive function abilities (EF) are positively, and significantly, associated with language development during the preschool years, such that children with good executive functions also have larger vocabularies and faster language development. However, why this is the case remains to be discovered....

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 caregi...

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 transiti...

Error-based theories of language acquisition suggest that children, like adults, continuously make and evaluate predictions in order to reach an adult-like state of language use. However, while these theories have become extremely influential, their central claim-that unpredictable input leads to higher rates of lasting change in linguistic represe...

Error-based theories of language acquisition suggest that children, like adults, continuously make and evaluate predictions in order to reach an adult-like state of language use. However, while these theories have become extremely influential, their central claim - that unpredictable input leads to higher rates of lasting change in linguistic repre...

In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order...

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focussing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained, varyi...

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 ind...

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 investiga...

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...

By the end of their first year, infants are able to interpret many different types of complex dynamic visual events, such as caused-motion, chasing, and goal-directed action. The present work examined whether there are meaningful individual differences in infants' ability to represent dynamic causal events in visual scenes and whether these differe...

Shared book reading is thought to have a positive impact on young children’s language development, with shared reading interventions often run in an attempt to boost children’s language skills. However, despite the volume of research in this area, a number of issues remain outstanding. The current meta-analysis explored whether shared reading inter...

Shared book reading is thought to have a positive impact on young children’s language development, with shared reading interventions often run in an attempt to boost children’s language skills. However, despite the volume of research in this area, a number of issues remain outstanding. The current meta-analysis explored whether shared reading inter...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on how their processing system is developing. In particular, recent studies suggest that individual differences in language processing speed play an important role in explaining the speed with which children acquire language. Inconsiste...

The fact that many sub-populations do not take part in research, especially participants from lower socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds, is a serious problem in education research. To increase the participation of such groups we must discover what social, economic and practical factors prevent participation, and how to overcome these barriers. In the c...

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

(Note that a published version of this paper is available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343425612_Syntactic_Representations_Are_Both_Abstract_and_Semantically_Constrained_Evidence_From_Children's_and_Adults'_Comprehension_and_ProductionPriming_of_the_English_Passive) A key question in language research is whether linguistic represe...

Baby sign – a set of gestures symbolising words such as ‘milk’ and ‘tired’ taught to hearing babies – is an increasingly popular activity amongst parents and their pre-verbal infants. Companies promoting baby sign claim it improves language development, decreases frustration and enhances parent-child bonding. However, it is unclear how, and whether...

Using data from the Language 0-5 Project (www.lucid.ac.uk), we explore whether participation in 'baby sign' affects: the pointing, reaching and showing gestures babies produce; the way mothers respond to the gestures; and children's vocabulary development.

This paper explores the relationship between children's oral-motor skills at 2 years, their vocabulary size at the same age, and their oral-motor and articulation skills a year later. Findings suggest that oral-motor skills develop similarly for the children in our study over time, and that they are related to concurrent, but not future, articulati...

The majority of the world's children grow up learning two or more languages. The study of early bilingualism is central to current psycholinguistics, offering insights into issues such as transfer and interference in development. From an applied perspective, it poses a universal challenge to language assessment practices throughout childhood, as ty...

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active fr...

Visual stimuli: Video clip pairs and their associated novel verbs used in the test trials of both eye-tracking and pointing tasks. (DOCX)

Sentence stimuli. (NB: Order of verb-action pairs was counterbalanced according to Latin squares. Therefore only 1/8 children started with mabbing). (DOCX)

Permutation analysis for eyetracking study Permutation Analysis: Two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process transitive sentence

Permutation analysis for eyetracking study Permutation Analysis: Two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process transitive sentence

Permutation analysis for eyetracking study

Permutation analysis for eyetracking study

Most work on competing cues in language acquisition has focussed on what happens when cues compete within a certain construction. There has been far less work on what happens when constructions themselves compete. The aim of the present chapter was to explore how the acquisition mechanism copes when constructions compete in a language. We present t...

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active fr...

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 expo...

In order to explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., *£5 was cost by the book), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible wi...

Data S1. Extended set of 475 verbs. Data S2. Animations.

In this study, we used pointing and eye-tracking to measure how 25- and 42-month-olds interpret the English passive (the boy is being refted by the girl), which has traditionally been considered ‘late-acquired’. We tested a) whether 25- and 42-month-olds can, in fact, interpret the passive in tasks with low task demands, and b) whether any poor per...

A ‘language-rich’ environment both at home and in the nursery is vital if a child is to progress easily through the many stages of early speech development. In the first of a series on communication and language, Professor Caroline Rowland and Dr Michelle Peter explain why

Participants aged 5;2-6;8, 9;2-10;6 and 18;1-22;2 (72 at each age) rated verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Daddy giggled the baby) using a five-point scale. The study was designed to investigate the feasibility of two proposed construction-general solutions to the question of how children retreat from, or avoid, such errors....

(Please contact Caroline Floccia, University of Plymouth for details).

ABSTRACT 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...

Authors' response - Volume 42 Issue 2 - BEN AMBRIDGE, EVAN KIDD, CAROLINE F. ROWLAND, ANNA THEAKSTON

This book examines the issue of competing motivations in grammar and language use. The term “competing motivations” refers to the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules and which speakers and addressees need to contend with when expressing themselves, or when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on...

How do children eventually come to avoid the production of overgeneralisation errors, in particular, those involving the dative (e.g., *I said her ''no'')? The present study addressed this question by obtaining from adults and children (5-6, 9-10 years) judgements of well-formed and over-general datives with 301 different verbs (44 for children). A...

Whilst some locative verbs alternate between the ground- and figure-locative constructions (e.g. Lisa sprayed the flowers with water/Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers), others are restricted to one construction or the other (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/*Lisa poured the cup with water). The present study investigated two proposals for how...

Productive language use depends on children first observing, and then generalising, grammatical patterns. For example, children hear pairs of sentences such as (a) and assume that other verbs heard in intransitive sentences can also alternate between the two structures. While this enables creative language use (b), it can also lead to overgeneralis...

Both children and adults predict the content of upcoming language, suggesting that prediction is useful for learning as well as processing. We present an alternative model which can explain prediction behaviour as a by-product of language learning. We suggest that a consideration of language acquisition places important constraints on Pickering & G...

At the heart of language acquisition lies a paradox: while children must form generalizations allowing them to use lexical items in non-attested constructions – such productivity is a defining characteristic of human language – they must learn to avoid applying these generalizations when an ungrammatical utterance would result. One generalization t...

This article reviews the some of the most widely used methods used for studying children's language acquisition including (1) spontaneous/naturalistic, diary, parental report data, (2) production methods (elicited production, repetition/elicited imitation, syntactic priming/weird word order), (3) comprehension methods (act-out, pointing, intermodal...

Unlabelled: This review investigates empirical evidence for different theoretical proposals regarding the retreat from overgeneralization errors in three domains: word learning (e.g., *doggie to refer to all animals), morphology [e.g., *spyer, *cooker (one who spies/cooks), *unhate, *unsqueeze, *sitted; *drawed], and verb argument structure [e.g.,...

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 taki...

Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of wellformed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositionalobject 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...

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., Lisa poured water into the cup; *Lisa poured the cup with water), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., *Bart filled water into the cup; Bart filled the cup with water), and others appearing in...

Research using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has consistently shown that English-learning children aged 2 can associate transitive argument structure with causal events. However, studies using the same methodology investigating 2-year-old children's knowledge of the conjoined agent intransitive and semantic role assignment hav...

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 m...

Research has demonstrated that young children quickly acquire knowledge of how the structure of their language encodes meaning. However, this work focused on structurally simple transitives. The present studies investigate childrens' comprehension of the double object dative (e.g., I gave him the box) and the prepositional dative (e.g., I gave the...

Purpose The question of how and when English-speaking children acquire auxiliaries is the subject of extensive debate. Some researchers posit the existence of innately given Universal Grammar principles to guide acquisition, although some aspects of the auxiliary system must be learned from the input. Others suggest that auxiliaries can be learned...

Purpose The study of auxiliary acquisition is central to work on language development and has attracted theoretical work from both nativist and constructivist approaches. This study is part of a 2-part companion set that represents a unique attempt to trace the development of auxiliary syntax by using a longitudinal elicitation methodology. The aim...

Previous studies have shown that children retreat from argument-structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Don't giggle me) by inferring that frequently encountered verbs are unlikely to be grammatical in unattested constructions, and by making use of syntax-semantics correspondences (e.g., verbs denoting internally caused actions such as giggling...

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 l...

A simple three-layer feed-forward network was trained to classify verbs as reversible with un-(e.g., unpack) reversible with dis-(e.g., disassemble) or non-reversible (e.g., squeeze), on the basis of their semantic features. The aim was to model a well-known phenomenon whereby children produce, then subsequently retreat from, overgeneralization err...

Positive and negative what, why and yes/no questions with the 3sg auxilia-ries can and does were elicited from 50 children aged 3;3–4;3. In support of the constructivist ''schema-combination'' account, only children who pro-duced a particular positive question type correctly (e.g., What does she want?) produced a characteristic ''auxiliary-doubling...

Participants (aged 5-6 yrs, 9-10 yrs and adults) rated (using a five-point scale) grammatical (intransitive) and overgeneralized (transitive causative)(1) uses of a high frequency, low frequency and novel intransitive verb from each of three semantic classes [Pinker, S. (1989a). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cam...

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as Is the boy who smoking is crazy? because they have innate knowledge of structure dependence and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid such errors, on the basi...

The ability to explain the occurrence of errors in children's speech is an essential component of successful theories of language acquisition. The present study tested some generativist and constructivist predictions about error on the questions produced by ten English-learning children between 2 and 5 years of age. The analyses demonstrated that,...

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 in...

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 noninversion error (Who she is hitting?) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxi...

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 freq...

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...

Many current generativist theorists suggest that young children possess the grammatical principles of inversion required for question formation but make errors because they find it difficult to learn language-specific rules about how inversion applies. The present study analyzed longitudinal spontaneous sampled data from twelve 2–3-year-old English...

This study examined patterns of auxiliary provision and omission for the auxiliaries BE and HAVE in a longitudinal data set from 11 children be-tween the ages of two and three years. Four possible explanations for aux-iliary omission—a lack of lexical knowledge, performance limitations in production, the Optional Infinitive hypothesis, and patterns...

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 dete...

We report three studies investigating children’s and adults’ comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6–7 years, 8–10 years, 11–12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by t...

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...

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...

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 suc...

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 synt...

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 expect...

It is widely accepted that children do not produce adult-like utterances from the very beginning of productive speech. For example, children learning English have a tendency to omit subjects where they are grammatically required and initially use fewer inflected forms of verbs and nouns and fewer auxiliaries than their adult models. Thus, nativist...

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...

Recent studies of wh-question acquisition have tended to come from the nativist side of the language acquisition debate with little input from a constructivist perspective. The present work was designed to redress the balance, first by presenting a detailed description of young children's wh-question acquisition data, second, by providing detailed...

BRENT, M. R. (ed.). (1997). Computational approaches to language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pp. 199. ISBN 0-262-52229-2. - - Volume 26 Issue 1 - JULIAN M. PINE, FERNAND R. GOBET, CAROLINE F. ROWLAND