The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials…

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same…

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension…

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age less than 33 weeks and/or birth weight less than 1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term…

Three experiments gauging 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to interpret and comprehend figurative language indicated that informative contexts could improve subjects' abilities to perceive idiomatic meanings. Subjects were less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them, but were able to perceive that language can be both figurative and…

Three studies assessing language comprehension of infants and toddlers through a method requiring a minimum of motor movement, no speech production, and differential visual fixation of two simultaneously presented video events provide insight into children's emerging linguistic capabilities and help resolve controversies about language production…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

Polysyllabic words from 2 Dutch children from 1;6 to 2;11 were truncated so that they fitted a trochaic (strong-weak SW) pattern, particularly in early samples. Some observations with respect to the (non)realization of determiners suggest an influence of a SW-constraint on the realization of noun phrases. Findings support the hypothesis that words…

Study of children who go through a "silent period" early in the course of second language development found that most of the children engaged in extensive private speech, including: repetition of others' utterances; recall and practice; creation of new linguistic forms; paradigmatic substitution; and rehearsal for overt social…