Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…

One important mechanism suggested to underlie the acquisition of grammar is rule learning. Indeed, infants aged 0 ; 7 are able to learn rules based on simple identity relations (adjacent repetitions, ABB: "wo fe fe" and non-adjacent repetitions, ABA: "wo fe wo", respectively; Marcus et al., 1999). One unexplored issue is…

Stoel-Gammon (this issue) provides a welcome addition to the phonological acquisition literature, bringing together insights from long-standing and more recent research to address the relationship between the developing phonological system and the developing lexicon. A growing literature on children's early use of words across languages and…

During the first eighteen months of life, infants acquire and refine a whole set of new motor skills that significantly change the ways in which the body moves in and interacts with the environment. In this review article, I argue that motor acquisitions provide infants with an opportunity to practice skills relevant to language acquisition before…

How do infants find the words in the speech stream? Computational models help us understand this feat by revealing the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies that infants might use. Here, we outline a computational model of word segmentation that aims both to incorporate cues proposed by language acquisition researchers and to…

There are numerous models of how speech segmentation may proceed in infants acquiring their first language. We present a framework for considering the relative merits and limitations of these various approaches. We then present a model of speech segmentation that aims to reveal important sources of information for speech segmentation, and to…

This study compared segmental distribution patterns for consonants and vowels in English infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS). A previous study of Korean indicated that segmental patterns of IDS differed from ADS patterns (Lee, Davis & MacNeilage, 2008). The aim of the current study was to determine whether such differences…

This study constitutes the beginning of a longitudinal investigation of phonological development of four children from birth to 2 years. Little variation was found in mean fundamental frequency. Duration, within-utterance range and variability did show developmental change. (RM)

Vocalizations of two female infants, recorded over a five-week period after the first emergence of cooing were studied. It was found that the features of the more primitive sound types regrouped themselves in comfort sounds. The implications for theories of prespeech development are discussed. (EJS)

This research disputes the traditional position on babbling by showing that the phonetic content of babbled utterances exhibits many of the same preferences for certain kinds of phonetic elements and sequences that have been found in the production of meaningful speech by children in later stages of language development. (Author/RM)

Examines phonetic variation in multisyllable babbling of infants from 7 to 11 months of age. The investigation was to verify assumptions that, in infant vocal development, there is a systematic increase in the phonetic variation of these babbles, and separate stages of repetitive and nonrepetitive babbling are posited. (22 references) (GLR)

One child's unique phonological rule is reported, which increased output variety and still yielded a mismatch with the adult form. It is argued that an addition to the strategies described by Menn is needed to account for the discovery of this rule and for later stages of phonological development. (Author)

Discusses published references to deaf infants babbling like normal hearing children and states that the relationship between babbling and hearing still remains to be proven. (EKN)

Uncertainty was researched as a perceptual structure which mediates the transition from sensorimotor activity to language. The guiding notions are that the attentional system is geared to uncertainty from the beginning of life and that a speaker's language use is coordinated with this system as it emerges. (Author)