This study focuses on parental use of parentese: the acoustically exaggerated, clear, and higher-pitched speech produced by adults across cultures when they address infants. While previous research shows that parentese enhances language learning and processing, it is still unclear what drives the variability in the amount of parental parentese…

Studies of the acquisition of verbs tend to focus on one-verb predicates of the prevalent English type. But in hundreds of languages around the world, multi-verb predicates like serial verb constructions are widely used. It could be reasoned that children should begin producing simple, single-verb predicates before they are able to produce…