In verbal irony, the speaker's intended meaning can be counterfactual to the literal meaning
of their words. This form of figurative language can help speakers achieve a number of …

Human communication requires impressive inferential abilities and mind-reading skills. To
learn how to speak and become competent communicators children need both. The …

To become competent communicators, children need to learn that what a speaker means
often goes beyond the literal meaning of what the speaker says. The acquisition of …

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a
protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three-and four …

When children acquire language, they often learn words in the absence of direct instruction
(eg 'This is a ball!') or even social cues to reference (eg eye gaze, pointing). However, there …

To better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development,
studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and …

Abstract English nominal premodifications such as adjective word order have piqued the
interest of researchers in recent years due to their learning difficulty for all language learners …

A central question in language acquisition research is how language is acquired by children
in naturalistic settings. For a long time, it has been assumed, within the influential generative …

In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the
ability to make inferences about a speaker's intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to …

Interpreting a speaker's communicative acts is a challenge children face permanently in
everyday life. In doing so, they seem to understand direct communicative acts more easily …