There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants' initial…

This study investigated age differences in the utilization of visually contrastive information (i.e., differently colored identical objects) for temporary referential ambiguity resolution during spoken sentence comprehension. Five- and 6-year-old Japanese children and adults listened to sentences that contained a color adjective-noun combination…

This study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5-6-year-old children were tested: monolingual…