Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…

A crucial human cognitive goal is to understand and to be understood. But understanding often takes active management. Two studies investigated early developmental processes of understanding management by focusing on young children's comprehension monitoring. We ask: When and how do young children actively monitor their comprehension of…

Speech disfluencies can convey information to listeners: Adults and children predict that filled pauses (e.g., "uhh") will be followed by referents that are difficult to describe or are new to the discourse. In adults, this is driven partly by an understanding that disfluencies reflect processing difficulties. This experiment examined…

To understand spoken words, listeners must appropriately interpret co-occurring talker characteristics and speech sound content. This ability was tested in 6- to 14-months-olds by measuring their looking to named food and body part images. In the "new talker" condition (n = 90), pictures were named by an unfamiliar voice; in the…

Age-related increases of speaking rate are not fully understood, but have been attributed to gains in biologic factors and learned skills that support speech production. This study investigated developmental changes in speaking rate and articulatory kinematics of participants aged 4 ("N" = 7), 7 ("N" = 10), 10…

This study used eye-tracking methodology to assess audiovisual speech perception in 26 children ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, half with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and half with typical development. Given the characteristic reduction in gaze to the faces of others in children with ASD, it was hypothesized that they would show reduced…

For socially appropriate communication, speakers must command a variety of linguistic styles, or "registers", that vary according to social context and social relationships. This study examined preschool children's ability to use a speaker's register choice to infer the identity of their addressee. Four-year-olds could draw correct inferences…