Readings

Note: We will cover all of these in class, but only the papers listed on the schedule are assigned readings.

Bergelson, E., & Aslin, R. N. (2017). Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6-mo-olds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Bergelson, E., Casillas, M., Soderstrom, M., Seidl, A., Warlaumont, A. S., & Amatuni, A. (2019). What Do North American Babies Hear? A large-scale cross-corpus analysis. Developmental Science, 22(1), e12724.

Berko, J. (1958). The child’s learning of English morphology. Radcliffe College.

Bloom, L. (1970). Form and Function of Children’s Speech. In Language Development.

Braine, M. D. S. (1971). On two types of models of the internalization of grammars. In The ontogenesis of grammar: A theoretical symposium (pp. 153–186).

Byers-Heinlein, K., Burns, T. C., & Werker, J. F. (2010). The roots of bilingualism in newborns. Psychological Science, 21(3), 343–348.

Cartmill, E. A., Armstrong, B. F., 3rd, Gleitman, L. R., Goldin-Meadow, S., Medina, T. N., & Trueswell, J. C. (2013). Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(28), 11278–11283.

Casillas, M., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (2020). Early language experience in a Papuan community. Journal of Child Language, 48, 792–814.

Casillas, Marisa, Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2020). Early language experience in a Tseltal Mayan village. Child Development, 91(5), 1819–1835.

de Villiers, J. G., & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2(3), 267–278.

Eimas, P. D., Siqueland, E. R., Jusczyk, P., & Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech perception in infants. Science, 171(3968), 303–306.

Feldman, H., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Gleitman, L. R. (1978). Beyond Herodotus: The creation of language by linguistically deprived deaf children. In A. Lock (Ed.), Action, Symbol, and Gesture: The Emergence of Language. Cambridge University Press.

Ferjan Ramírez, N., Lieberman, A. M., & Mayberry, R. I. (2013). The initial stages of first-language acquisition begun in adolescence: when late looks early. Journal of Child Language, 40(2), 391–414.

Foushee, R., & Srinivasan, M. (2024). Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(23), e2311425121.

Gerken, L., Landau, B., & Remez, R. E. (1990). Function morphemes in young children’s speech perception and production. Developmental Psychology, 26(2), 204–216.

Gervain, J., Nespor, M., Mazuka, R., Horie, R., & Mehler, J. (2008). Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: A Japanese–Italian cross-linguistic study. Cognitive Psychology, 57(1), 56–74.

Gleitman, L. R., & Newport, E. L. (1995). The invention of language by children: Environmental and biological influences on the acquisition of language. In An Invitation to Cognitive Science (Vol. 1, pp. 1–24). MIT Press.

Golinkoff, R. M., Hoff, E., Rowe, M. L., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2018). Language Matters: Denying the Existence of the 30-Million-Word Gap Has Serious Consequences. Child Development.

Kocab, A., Senghas, A., Coppola, M., & Snedeker, J. (2023). Potentially recursive structures emerge quickly when a new language community forms. Cognition, 232, 105261.

Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. R. (1985). Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child. Harvard University Press.

Lidz, J., & Gagliardi, A. (2015). How Nature Meets Nurture: Universal Grammar and Statistical Learning. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 333–353.

Marchman, V. A., & Fernald, A. (2008). Speed of word recognition and vocabulary knowledge in infancy predict cognitive and language outcomes in later childhood. Developmental Science, 11(3), F9-16.

Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science, 283(5398), 77–80.

Marquis, A., & Shi, R. (2012). Initial morphological learning in preverbal infants. Cognition, 122(1), 61–66.

Mayberry, R. I., Lock, E., & Kazmi, H. (2002). Linguistic ability and early language exposure. Nature, 417(6884), 38.

Mayberry, R. I., Hatrak, M., Ilbasaran, D., Cheng, Q., Huang, Y., & Hall, M. L. (2024). Impoverished language in early childhood affects the development of complex sentence structure. Developmental Science, 27(1), e13416.

Mintz, T. H., Newport, E. L., & Bever, T. G. (1995). Distributional Regularities of Form Class in Speech to Young Children. North East Linguistic Society, 43–54.

Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language, 17(2), 357–374.

Newport, E. L. (2016). Statistical language learning: computational, maturational, and linguistic constraints. Language and Cognition, 8(3), 447–461.

Newport, E. L., & Getz, H. R. (2025). Language acquisition and the human brain (Vol. 2). In J. Binder (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the Human Brain. Elsevier.

Newport, E. L., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (1977). Mother, I’d rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In C. E. Snow & C. A. Ferguson (Eds.), Talking to children: Language input and interaction (pp. 109–150). Cambridge University Press.

Newport, E. L., Seydell-Greenwald, A., Landau, B., Turkeltaub, P. E., Chambers, C. E., Martin, K. C., Rennert, R., Giannetti, M., Dromerick, A. W., Ichord, R. N., Carpenter, J. L., Berl, M. M., & Gaillard, W. D. (2022). Language and developmental plasticity after perinatal stroke. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(42), e2207293119.

Perkins, L., & Lidz, J. (2021). Eighteen-month-old infants represent nonlocal syntactic dependencies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(41).

Petitto, L. A., Holowka, S., Sergio, L. E., & Ostry, D. (2001). Language rhythms in baby hand movements. Nature, 413(6851), 35–36.

Petitto, L. A., Katerelos, M., Levy, B. G., Gauna, K., Tétreault, K., & Ferraro, V. (2001). Bilingual signed and spoken language acquisition from birth: implications for the mechanisms underlying early bilingual language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 28(2), 453–496.

Petitto, L. A., & Marentette, P. F. (1991). Babbling in the manual mode: evidence for the ontogeny of language. Science, 251(5000), 1493–1496.

Poeppel, D., & Wexler, K. (1993). The full competence hypothesis of clause structure in early German. Language, 69(1), 1–33.

Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926–1928.

Schuler, K., Yang, C., & Newport, E. (2016). Testing the Tolerance Principle: Children form productive rules when it is more computationally efficient to do so. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2321–2326.

Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Ozyürek, A. (2004). Children creating core properties of language: evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305(5691), 1779–1782.

Shi, R., Cutler, A., Werker, J., & Cruickshank, M. (2006). Frequency and form as determinants of functor sensitivity in English-acquiring infants. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119(6), EL61-7.

Shi, R., Emond, E., & Badri, S. (2020). Hierarchical structure dependence in infants at the early stage of syntactic acquisition. In M. Brown & Alexanra Kohut (Ed.), Proceedings of the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 572–585). Cascadilla Press.

Shi, R., Werker, J. F., & Cutler, A. (2006). Recognition and Representation of Function Words in English-Learning Infants. Infancy: The Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, 10(2), 187–198.

Sperry, D. E., Sperry, L. L., & Miller, P. J. (2019a). Language Does Matter: But There is More to Language Than Vocabulary and Directed Speech. Child Development, 90(3), 993–997.

Sperry, D. E., Sperry, L. L., & Miller, P. J. (2019b). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development, 90(4), 1303–1318.

Supalla, S. J. (1991). Manually Coded English: Modality in Signed Language Development. In P. Siple & S. D. Fischer (Eds.), Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research Volume 2: Psychology (Vol. 2, p. 85 109).

Weikum, W. M., Oberlander, T. F., Hensch, T. K., & Werker, J. F. (2012). Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(suppl. 2), 17221–17227.

Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior & Development, 7(1), 49–63.

Zhang, Z., Shi, R., & Li, A. (2015). Grammatical Categorization in Mandarin-Chinese-Learning Infants. Language Acquisition, 22(1), 104–115.