Infant-directed speech (IDS) is phonetically distinct from adult-directed speech (ADS): It is typically considered to have special prosody--like higher pitch and slower speaking rates--as well as unique speech sound properties, for example, more breathy, hyperarticulated, and/or variable consonant and vowel articulation. These phonetic features…

To learn words, infants must be sensitive to native phonological contrast. While lexical tone predominates as a source of phonemic contrast in human languages, there has been little investigation of the influences of lexical tone on word learning. The present study investigates infants' sensitivity to tone mispronunciations in two groups of…

Previous work has shown that preterm infants are at higher risk for cognitive/language delays than full-term infants. Recent studies, focusing on prosody (i.e. rhythm, intonation), have suggested that prosodic perception development in preterms is indexed by maturational rather than postnatal/listening age. However, because prosody is heard…

Previous research has shown that the weighting of, or attention to, acoustic cues at the level of the segment changes over the course of development ( Nittrouer & Miller, 1997; Nittrouer, Manning & Meyer, 1993). In this paper we examined changes over the course of development in weighting of acoustic cues at the suprasegmental level. Specifically,…