[For a sequential listing of the readings, see the Syllabus page.]
Aravind, Athulya, Jill de Villiers, Amy Pace, Hannah Valentine, Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Aquiles Iglesias, and Mary Sweig Wilson (2018). “Fast Mapping Word Meanings across Trials: Young Children Forget All but Their First Guess.” Cognition 177: 177–188.
Aravind, Athulya, Danny Fox, and Martin Hackl (2023). “Principles of Presupposition in Development.” Linguistics and Philosophy 46: 291–332.
Barner, David, Neon Brooks, and Alan Bale (2011). “Accessing the Unsaid: The Role of Scalar Alternatives in Children’s Pragmatic Inference.” Cognition 118(1): 84–93.
Bedny, Marina, Jorie Koster-Hale, Giulia Elli, Lindsay Yazzolino, and Rebecca Saxe (2019). “There’s More to ‘Sparkle’ than Meets the Eye: Knowledge of Vision and Light Verbs among Congenitally Blind and Sighted Individuals.” Cognition 189: 105–115.
Bloom, Paul (2000). “First Words” (Chapter 1) in How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. MIT Press.
Carnie, Andrew (2002). “NP/DP Movement” (Chapter 9) in Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Blackwell Publishers. pp. 225–253.
Chien, Yu-Chin, and Kenneth Wexler (1990). “Children’s Knowledge of Locality Conditions in Binding as Evidence for the Modularity of Syntax and Pragmatics.” Language Acquisition 1(3): 225–295.
Chomsky, Noam (1975). Chapter 1 (“On Cognitive Capacity”) in Reflections on Language. Pantheon. pp. 3–35.
Curtiss, Susan (2013). “Revisiting Modularity: Using Language as a Window to the Mind” (PDF) in Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Robert C. Berwick (eds.), Rich Languages From Poor Inputs. Oxford University Press.
Deen, Kamil Ud (2011). “The Acquisition of the Passive” in Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper (eds.), Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 41). Springer.
Dyer, Fred C., and Jeffrey A. Dickinson (1996). “Sun-Compass Learning in Insects: Representation in a Simple Mind.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 5(3): 67–72.
Elbourne, Paul (2005). “On the Acquisition of Principle B.” Linguistic Inquiry 36(3): 333–365.
Gleitman, Lila R. (1990). “The Structural Sources of Verb Meaning” (PDF) in Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 28: 1–48.
Gout, Ariel, Anne Christophe, and James L. Morgan (2004) “Phonological Phrase Boundaries Constrain Lexical Access II. Infant Data.” Journal of Memory and Language 51: 548–567.
Grice, H.P. (1957). “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66: 377–88.
Guasti, Maria Teresa (2017). Language Acquisition: The Growth of Grammar (2nd edition). MIT
Press.
Hornstein, Norbert (2013). “Fodor on Concepts.” Faculty of Language blog post, February 25, 2013.
Hunter, Tim, and Jeffrey Lidz (2013). “Conservativity and Learnability of Determiners.” Journal of Semantics 30(3): 315–334.
Keenan, Edward L. (2002). “Some Properties of Natural Language Quantifiers: Generalized Quantifier Theory.” Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 627–654.
Maratsos, Michael, Dana E.C. Fox, Judith A. Becker, and Mary Anne Chalkley (1985). “Semantic Restrictions on Children’s Passives.” Cognition 19: 167–191.
Melançon, Andréan, and Rushen Shi (2013). “Grammatical Knowledge and its Immediate Processing during Online Comprehension by Infants” (PDF). Proceedings of the 37th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development 2: 251–264. Cascadilla Press.
Noveck, Ira A. (2001). “When Children Are More Logical than Adults: Experimental Investigations of Scalar Implicature.” Cognition 78: 165–188.
Perkins, Laurel, and Jeffrey Lidz (2021). “Eighteen-Month-Old Infants Represent Nonlocal Syntactic Dependencies.” PNAS 118(41): e2026469118.
Philip, William (2011). “Acquiring Knowledge of Universal Quantification.” in Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper (eds.), Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 41). Springer.
Saffran, Jenny R., Richard N. Aslin, and Elissa L. Newport (1996). “Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants.” Science 274(5294): 1926–1928.
Schütze, Carson T., and Kenneth Wexler (1996). “Subject Case Licensing and English Root Infinitives” (PDF). Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development 20: 670–681. Cascadilla Press.
Senghas, Ann (1995). “The Development of Nicaraguan Sign Language via the Language Acquisition Process.” Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development 19: 543–552. Cascadilla Press.
Shi, Rushen, Emeryse Emond, and Sophia Badri (2020). “Hierarchical Structure Dependence in Infants at the Early Stage of Syntactic Acquisition.” Proceedings of the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development 572–585. Cascadilla Press.
Shi, Rushen, and Mélanie Lepage (2008). “The Effect of Functional Morphemes on Word Segmentation in Preverbal Infants.” Developmental Science 11(3): 407–413.
Shukla, Mohinish, Katherine S. White, and Richard N. Aslin (2011). “Prosody Guides the Rapid Mapping of Auditory Word Forms onto Visual Objects in 6-Month-Old Infants.” PNAS 108(15): 6038–6043.
Smith, Linda, and Chen Yu (2008). “Infants Rapidly Learn Word-Referent Mappings via Cross-Situational Statistics” (PDF). Cognition 106(3): 1558–1568.
Thornton, Rosalind (2016). “Acquisition of Questions” in Jeffrey Lidz, William Snyder, and Joe Pater (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Trueswell, John C., Tamara Nicol Medina, Alon Hafri, and Lila R. Gleitman (2012). “Propose but Verify: Fast Mapping Meets Cross-Situational Word Learning.” Cognitive Psychology 66(1): 126–156.
von Fintel, Kai (2002). 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory lecture notes.
——— (2008). “What is Presupposition Accommodation, Again?” Philosophical Perspectives 22(1): 137–170.
Wexler, Ken (2011). “Grammatical Computation in the Optional Infinitive Stage” in Jill de Villiers and Tom Roeper (eds.), Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 41). Springer.
Woodard, Kristina, Lila R. Gleitman, and John C. Trueswell (2016). “Two- and Three-Year-Olds Track a Single Meaning during Word Learning: Evidence for Propose-but-Verify” (PDF). Language and Learning Development 12(3): 252–261.
Yuan, Sylvia, and Cynthia Fisher (2009). "‘Really? She Blicked the baby?’: Two-Year-Olds Learn Combinatorial Facts about Verbs By Listening" (PDF). Psychological Science 20(5): 619–626.
