BUCLD 50: Proceedings of the 50th annual
Boston University Conference on Language Development
edited by Romi Hill, Xinhan Jiang, Danutham Worapipat, and Aditya Yedetore
ISBN 978-1-57473-047-0 paperback, $124.00 (shipping August 2026)
This two-volume set will include 70 presentations from the 50th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, held November 2025.
The entire proceedings will also be available directly from this page with open access.
Contents
Volume 1
Preface
Romi Hill, Xinhan Jiang, Danutham Worapipat, and Aditya Yedetore
xi
Hi, Thanks, and Goodbye: From the Wug Test to AI
Jean Berko Gleason
1-14
Constraints on Wh-Movement: Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar
Jill de Villiers
15-27
Abstract Innate Interfaces Are the Heart of Universal Grammar and Guide Acquisition
Tom Roeper
28-40
Parameters
William Snyder
41-46
Good and Bad Arguments For and Against Linguistic Nativism
Virginia Valian
47-52
Bilingual Bimodal Hard-of-Hearing Children with a Forced Displacement Background in Germany: A Pilot Study on Morphosyntactic Developmental Trajectories of German Spoken Language and German Sign Language
Lina Abed Ibrahim, Solveig Chilla, Anne Wienholz, and Barbara Hänel-Faulhaber
53-70
Neural Correlates of Scrambling in First and Second Language Processing: An ERP Challenge to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis
Jae Hyun Ahn and Laurent Dekydtspotter
71-85
Japanese-Speaking Children's Interpretation of Comparatives with a Non-Numeral Scalar Quantifier: Sukosi ooi 'a few more'
Tomoe Arii and Takuya Goro
86-94
Moving Beyond Forced-Choice: A Fresh Perspective on Children's Disjunction Comprehension
Maumita Bhaumik and Masoud Jasbi
95-108
Acquiring Conditional Disjunction: Romanian Five-Year-Olds Struggle with Implicit Conditionals
Adina Camelia Bleotu, Deborah Foucault, Anton Benz, Lyn Tieu, and Tom Roeper
109-122
Children Selectively Drop Expletive Subjects: The Role of Referentiality, Topicality and Argumenthood
Núria Bosch and Theresa Biberauer
123-136
Allemaal Trouble in the Acquisition of Dutch Quantifiers
Bram Buijkx and Andrea Gualmini
137-150
L3 Spanish Effects in L2 Acquisition of English Causative Psych Verbs
Vatcharit Chantajinda
151-164
From um to Words: The Role of Disfluency Interactions in Shaping Early Language Development
Yue Chen
165-178
A Snapshot of (Really) Early CP Occurrence: Sentence Final Particles in Child Japanese
Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu and Zixi Liu
179-191
The Bare Truth: Bare Nominals Acquisition Challenges for Brazilian Learners of English, French, and Spanish
Antonio Codina Bobia and Elaine Grolla
192-205
Children Compute More Ad-Hoc Implicatures from a than the: On the Interaction of Definiteness and Ad-Hoc Implicatures
André Eliatamby and Lyn Tieu
206-219
Linking Vocabulary Knowledge with Theory of Mind and Online Social Reasoning in Adults
Mikaela Elliott, Patricia J. Brooks, C. Donnan Gravelle, and Arshia Lodhi
220-233
Tolerance Principle and Small Language Model Learning
Adam E. Friedman, Stevan Harnad, and Rushen Shi
234-247
What Does Bimodal Bilingual Vocabulary Acquisition Look Like in Deaf Children with Hearing Parents?
Linghui Eva Gan, Angelica Llerena, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Deborah Chen Pichler
248-257
In Control or Not? Acquisition of Non-Finite Adjunct Clauses in Romanian vs. English
Juliana Gerard, Adina Camelia Bleotu, and Dana McDaniel
258-270
Non-Adjacent Dependencies and Abstract Grammatical Representation in One-Year-Old Infants
Audrey-Anne Gilbert, Manuel Español-Echevarría, and Rushen Shi
271-282
Subcategorizing Adjectives with Multiple Frames
Megan Gotowski and Kaitlyn Harrigan
283-293
The Emergence and Maintenance of Bilingualism Among the Old Order Amish
Theres Grüter, Tobias Frick, Mark L. Louden, Leonie Strickler, and Guido Seiler
294-308
Hierarchical Bias: Domain-General or Language-Specific?
Kaitlyn Harrigan, Sadhwi Srinivas, Aidan Burnham, and Nicholas Voivoda
309-322
Acquisition of Socio-Phonetic Variation: A Case Study of Coda /ɾ/ Variation in Dominican Spanish-Speaking Children and Their Caregivers
Emily Herman, Karen Miller, and Matthew T. Carlson
323-332
The Role of Working Memory in Japanese-Speaking Children's Comprehension of Active and Passive Sentences
Megumi Ishikawa and Hiromichi Hagihara
333-346
Corpus-Based Population-Level Estimates of Onset Age-of-Acquisition for English Function Words
Masoud Jasbi, Aaron Pilapil, and Debbie Odufuwa
347-361
Temporal Orientation Is a Robust Cue to Attitude Class in Child-Directed Speech
Alice Jesus, Elizabeth Swanson, Jeffrey Lidz, and Valentine Hacquard
362-375
Children's Understanding of Factivity in Hungarian
Anna Kispál, Ágnes Melinda Kovács, and Rachel Dudley
376-389
Neural Mechanisms of Adult Bilingual Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
Noelani Kong-Johnson and Kamil Ud Deen
390-403
L1 Influence on the Distinction Between Definite and Demonstrative Descriptions in L2 English
Keisuke Kume
404-416
Investigating the Impact of Contextual Information on L2 Garden Path Sentence Comprehension
Jiaxing Lin
417-425
L2 English Speakers Process Non-Binary Pronouns as Efficiently as Native English Speakers
Runchen Liu
426-438
The Impact of Caregiver Prompt Type on Pragmatic Responses in Children with ASD
Zifei Liu
439-452
Children Face Ambiguous Input Early On: A Cross-Linguistic Corpus Analysis of Homophones
Youtao Lu and Yukie Nagai
453-466
Volume 2
Children's Understanding of Necessity Modals: Evidence from French
Oana Lungu, Anouk Dieuleveut, Valentine Hacquard, and Ailís Cournane
467-478
What Modulates Toddlers' Use of Familiar Words in Resolving Novel Noun Reference? A Preferential Looking Study
Lean Luo, Xiaolu Yang, Stella Christie, and Rushen Shi
479-491
The Development of Pluperfect: Evidence from Greek
Marina Mastrokosta and Vina Tsakali
492-505
Ellipsis in Contact: VPE and Sluicing in Spanish Heritage Speakers
Erin Mauffray, Victoria Mateu, and Rodrigo Ranero
506-519
Children's Acquisition of Argument-Head Tone Sandhi in Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso)
Laura McPherson
520-532
English vs. Mandarin Wh-Question Comprehension in Toddlers: Influence of Movement Type and Distance Effect
Chaowei Nie, Yi (Esther) Su, Stephanie Durrleman, and Letitia Naigles
533-543
"Subject-Only" Is Not Always Difficult for Children: Evidence from Unaccusative Constructions in Japanese
Akari Ohba, Wataru Sugiura, and Hiroyuki Shimada
544-559
Rethinking Interface Vulnerability in L2 Acquisition
Chika Okada
560-571
The Effect of L1 and L2 on Acquiring the Scope of Disjunction and Negation in L3 Japanese
Tokiko Okuma
572-585
Anti-Locality in L2 Syntax: Universal Constraints vs. L1 Transfer: Evidence from Japanese Learners of English
Yuichi Ono, Kasumi Takahashi, and Reina Mogushi
586-599
Evaluating Neural Language Models as a Cognitive Model of Human Second Language Acquisition by Comparing the Developmental Trajectory Between Human and Model Learning
Rin Otokawa, Tomoki Miyamoto, and Akira Utsumi
600-612
You Can't Not Learn: Exploring the Acquisition of Negative Concord in L2 Spanish Learners
Elena Pagliarini, Jin Yan, and Anna Gavarró
613-625
Children Use an Agent's Goals to Determine Event Culmination
Madison D. Paron and Anna Papafragou
626-639
Bareness in Wh-Operators and Syntactic Intervention: Evidence from Sluicing in Child Italian
Elena Pettenon and Emanuela Sanfelici
640-653
Child Comprehension of Marathi Gapped Relative Clauses
Anupama Reddy and Kamil Deen
654-667
Second Language Speech Assimilation in an Optimal Transport Framework
Joselyn Rodriguez, Patrick Shafto, and Naomi H. Feldman
668-681
Variable Subject Pronoun Expression in Dominican Spanish: A Case Study of Child Directed Speech and Adult Directed Speech
Romi Román and Karen Miller
682-694
Negative Concord in L2-Russian
Eleanor Sand and Tania Ionin
695-708
Countering the Input-Driven Semantic Subset Principle Account of Disjunction Under Negation
Tetsuya Sano, Akari Ohba, and Kamil Deen
709-723
Pronoun Interpretation in Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from 400 Autistic and Neurotypical Children
Atty Schouwenaars, Petra Hendriks, Franziska Baumeister, Ehsan Solaimani, Elisabet Vila Borrellas, Pauline Wolfer, and Stephanie Durrleman
724-735
Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory into Azerbaijani: Words and Sentences
Sabina Sharifova and Patricia J. Brooks
736-749
Passive Voice Is Still Difficult to Acquire: Korean Monolingual Children's Comprehension of Suffixal Passive Construction Through Webcam Eye-Tracking
Gyu-Ho Shin and Seongmin Mun
750-763
Novel Word Learning in Second Grade Predicts Later Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Supraja Srikumar, Anna Ehrhorn, Taylor Bryant, Dawna Duff, and Suzanne Adlof
764-774
Syntax First: Re-Examination of Clefts in Child Japanese
Wataru Sugiura and Kamil Deen
775-787
Syntactic or Overloading? Adverbial Effects on the Processing of that-Trace Structures in L1 and L2 Grammars
Kasumi Takahashi and Yuichi Ono
788-799
Understanding Sentences with Focus Particles Using Visual Alternatives: Children Do Not Ignore only
Lyn Tieu and Petra Schulz
800-813
Tracking the Role of Prosody in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Children Speaking English as an Additional Language (EAL)
Chara Triantafyllidou, Margreet Vogelzang, and Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
814-827
The Role of UG and the Unergative/Unaccusative Asymmetry in Interlanguage Grammar
Hirokazu Tsutsumi, Takayuki Kimura, and Takaaki Hirokawa
828-838
To Be In-Situ or Ex-Situ? The Morphosyntax of WH-Questions
in Brazilian Portuguese and French Acquisition
Clariana Vieira and Elaine Grolla
839-852
Development of Syntax in Spoken English by Bimodal Bilingual Deaf Children: Comparison with Hearing Bilinguals and Monolinguals
Shuyan Wang, Margaret Chui Yi Lee, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Deborah Chen Pichler
853-863
The Role of Negation Position in German: Developmental Patterns in Children's Comprehension
Merle Weicker and Petra Schulz
864-877
Effect of Indefiniteness on Mandarin-Speaking Children's Comprehension of the Double-Object Construction
Yulun Wu, Xiaolu Yang, and Stella Christie
878-890
Children's Acquisition of the Felicity Condition of Mandarin dou
Ting Xu, Mingming Liu, Li-Chen Chuang, and Stella Christie
891-904
John knows Mary Likes what: Learning Attitude Verbs by Speech Acts in a Wh-in-Situ Language
Yixuan Yan
905-918
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