One of the cues that children might use in learning words is the level of certainty that speakers demonstrate in their naming of a novel object. This study presented 52 4-5 year old Dutch children with a word-learning task in which two puppets each used the same label for a different novel object. In three conditions, puppets expressed their level of speaker certainty lexically (e.g. 'I know this is a mit' vs. 'I think this is a mit'), they used discourse means to convey certainty (e.g. 'I play with this a lot. Yes, a mit', vs. 'I've never played with this. Well, a mit') or they combined the two. In all conditions, children were more likely to pick the object referred to by the more certain puppet as the referent of the new word, demonstrating that speaker certainty is a relevant cue in the word learning process.

This study investigated how speaker certainty (a rational cue) and speaker benevolence (an emotional cue) influence children's willingness to learn words in a selective learning paradigm. In two experiments four-to six-year-olds learnt novel labels from two speakers and, after a week, their memory for these labels was reassessed. Results demonstrated that children retained the label-object pairings for at least a week. Furthermore, children preferred to learn from certain over uncertain speakers, but they had no significant preference for nice over nasty speakers. When the cues were combined, children followed certain speakers, even if they were nasty. However, children did prefer to learn from nice and certain speakers over nasty and certain speakers. These results suggest that rational cues regarding a speaker's linguistic competence trump emotional cues regarding a speaker's affective status in word learning. However, emotional cues were found to have a subtle influence on this process.

thank you for arranging the visit and for your inspiring meetings. My research depends for a big part on data collected by means of digital questionnaires. I am very grateful to all participants; without them this dissertation would not exist. Thank you for participating! Tige Tank! I also want to thank Anouk, Lotte, Joanna and Heidi for proofreading parts of my dissertation. Your help is greatly appreciated! Heidi, thank you for letting me use your format. Working at UiL-OTS was a great experience. I am blessed to have had many colleagues who have made the Trans such an enjoyable place to work. I'd like to thank the members of the PhD crew for our interesting discussions about syntax, help with each other's work, and the good times we've shared:

This paper discusses the two types of infinitives in Frisian: infinitives ending in -E (e.g. rinne “walk”) and infinitives ending in -EN (e.g. rinnen “walk”). It shows that their distribution can be accounted for by their different underlying syntactic structure: the -E infinitive has a fully verbal structure whereas the -EN infinitive has a flexible structure which always involves a DP. Moreover, I argue that the fact that the difference between the two forms is disappearing can be explained both by Dutch influence and by the fact that the structure of the infinitives already showed much overlap.