Research on the acoustic characteristics of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) in North American English indicates that it is generally higher-pitched than Adult Directed Speech (ADS) and has unique prosodic characteristics, which is commonly found across many spoken languages. However, very little research has addressed another important aspect of…

This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status…

Prior work demonstrated that toddlers can learn words from a speaker with a foreign accent and generalize that learning to the native accent when the accented variation does not cross phoneme boundaries. The current study explores the situation in which a vowel in the foreign accent is produced such that it could be confused with a different…

Does language development drive language change? A common account of language change attributes the regularity of certain patterns to children's learning biases. The present study examines these predictions for change-in-progress in the use of "must" in Toronto English. Historically, modal verbs like "must" start with root…

Maternal scaffolding and four-year-old children's linguistic skills were examined during toy play. Participants were 21 American-English monolingual and 21 Thai monolingual mother-child dyads. Results revealed cross-cultural differences in conversation styles between the two groups. American dyads adopted a high-elaborative style relative to Thai…

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

In learning language, children must discover how to interpret the linguistic significance of phonetic variation. On some accounts, receptive phonology is grounded in perceptual learning of phonetic categories from phonetic distributions drawn over the infant's sample of speech. On other accounts, receptive phonology is instead based on phonetic…