A persistent mystery in language acquisition is how speakers are able to learn seemingly arbitrary distributional restrictions. This article investigates one such case: the fact that speakers resist using certain adjectives prenominally (e.g. ?? the asleep man ). Experiment 1 indicates that speakers tentatively generalize or categorize the distributional restriction beyond their previous experience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that speakers are sensitive to statistical preemption —that is, speakers learn not to use a formulation if an alternative formulation with the same function is consistently witnessed. Moreover, they are able to generalize the restriction to apply to other members of the category as well. Finally, experiment 3 finds evidence that speakers discount a pseudopreemptive context, rationally ignoring it as uninformative.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have been instrumental for discerning the relationship between children’s aerobic fitness and aspects of cognition, yet language processing remains unexplored. ERPs linked to the processing of semantic information (the N400) and the analysis of language structure (the P600) were recorded from higher and lower aerobically fit children as they read normal sentences and those containing semantic or syntactic violations. Results revealed that higher fit children exhibited greater N400 amplitude and shorter latency across all sentence types, and a larger P600 effect for syntactic violations. Such findings suggest that higher fitness may be associated with a richer network of words and their meanings, and a greater ability to detect and/or repair syntactic errors. The current findings extend previous ERP research explicating the cognitive benefits associated with greater aerobic fitness in children and may have important implications for learning and academic performance.

The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5;2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN 1 N 2 , paired with a novel abstract meaning: N 2 approaches N 1 . At the same time, we find that children are keenly sensitive to the input: they show knowledge of the construction after a single day of exposure but this grows stronger after three days; also, children generalize more readily to new verbs when the input contains more than one verb. Keywords:verb argument structures; artificial language learning; novel construction learning; statistical learning Running head: NOVEL CONSTRUCTION LEARNING IN FIVE-YEAR-OLDS 3A characteristic property of natural languages is the systematic correlation between structural patterns and abstract semantic or information structure functions (Fillmore, 1968;Pinker, 1989;Landau & Gleitman, 1985;Grimshaw, 1990). Such correspondences in the domain of argument structure-encapsulated by the notion of argument structure constructions-provide the basic clause types of a language (Goldberg, 1995). For example, the English sentences Katie gave Jack the book and Poppy baked Henry a cake are both instances of the ditransitive construction-a common phrasal pattern involving a subject and two objects. The two sentences contain distinct words but both convey actual or intended transfer. Our knowledge of this abstract linking is evident in the fact that we can use the construction productively-i.e., it can be used with new lexical items that may or may not lexically encode the transfer meaning. For example, if asked what She mooped him something means, speakers are quite likely to guess that she gave him something (Ahrens, 1995;Goldberg, 1995). In fact, adults generally interpret utterances with novel verbs by attending to the semantics of the argument structure constructions involved (Kaschak & Glenberg, 2000;Goldwater & Markman, 2009;Kako 2006; Johnson & Goldberg, submitted a).At the same time, there is a question about whether young children are able to use argument structure constructions in the same way as adults. There is a great deal of evidence that children's early productions tend to avoid straying too far from their input. For example, when children younger than three hear a novel verb used intransitively, they are highly unlikely to productively transitivize it (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997;Baker, 1979;Bates & MacWhinney, 1987;Braine, 1976;Pinker, 1989;Tomasello, 2000). Such experimental data, along with data from spontaneous production (Bowerman, 1982;Tomasello, 1992;Lieven, Pine, & Baldwin, 1997;Ingram & Thompson, 1996), have led to the proposal that early grammars lack abstract argument structure representations and that apparent uses of a construction actually rely on verb-specific representations (so called verb-islands;Tomasello, 2000).Evidence from comprehension is somewhat more mixed. Experiment...

Constructionist approaches to language hypothesize that grammar can be learned from the input using domain‐general mechanisms. This emphasis has engendered a great deal of research—exemplified in the present issue—that seeks to illuminate the ways in which input‐related factors can both drive and constrain constructional acquisition. In this commentary piece, we situate results reported by contributors to the present issue within the larger body of acquisition work in the constructionist framework. We address the importance of both type frequency and skewed input samples in the development of constructional categories and we compare different ways that the association between verbs and constructions can be measured, including through the use of conditional probabilities, lexical biases, and introspective judgments.