Abstract For both adults and children, learning from one’s mistakes (error-based learning) has been shown to be advantageous over avoiding errors altogether (errorless learning) in pedagogical settings. However, it remains unclear whether this advantage carries over to nonpedagogical settings in children, who mostly learn language in such settings. Using irregular plurals (e.g., “mice”) as a […]

Abstract There is ample evidence that individual-level cognitive mechanisms active during language learning and use can contribute to the evolution of language. For example, experimental work suggests that learners will reduce case marking in a language where grammatical roles are reliably indicated by fixed word order, a correlation found robustly in the languages of the […]

Spatial cognition is fundamental to our species. One might therefore expect that spatial communication systems would have evolved to make common distinctions. However, many have argued that spatial communication systems exhibit considerable cross-linguistic diversity, challenging the view that space structures language. We review recent work on spatial communication that merits revisiting the relationship between language […]