One striking commonality between languages is their Zipfian distributions: A power-law distribution of word frequency. This distribution is found across languages, speech genres, and within different parts of speech. The recurrence of such distributions is thought to reflect cognitive and/or… read more
The chapter explores the distribution and content of frequent frames – recurring multiword sequences – appearing at the start of utterances in speech directed to young Hebrew-speaking children. Previous work has documented the existence and prevalence of such frames in several languages (English,… read more
There is growing evidence that multiword information affects processing. In this paper, we look at the effect of word and multiword frequency on the phonetic duration of words in spontaneous speech to (a) extend previous findings and (b) ask whether the relation between word and multiword… read more
Textbook descriptions of how production develops in first language acquisition often move from babbling (producing syllables), through single-word utterances, to multi-word combinations. This progression emphasizes the small-to-big aspect of language learning where each stage involves larger, more… read more
In this chapter, I outline the developmental path of relative clauses in Hebrew while asking more general questions about how constructions are learned. I argue that Hebrew-speaking children show a gradual expansion of uses that is sensitive to the distributional patterns in their input. This… read more