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…

A crucial part of language development is learning how various social and contextual language-external factors constrain an utterance's meaning. This learning process is poorly understood. Five experiments addressed one hundred thirty-one 3- to 5-year-old children's use of one such socially relevant information source: talker characteristics.…

Three-, four- and five-year-old children were presented an array of metamemory tasks designed to test their understanding of variables which affect the difficulty of memory performance. (JMB)

Sinclair-de Zwart's findings on relationships between cognitive and linguistic development were compared with data gathered in Australia from 162 first-, second-, and third-grade Greek-English bilinguals (tested in both languages) and 136 English monoglots in the same classroom. (Author/CS)