This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases…

This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to…

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object--word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids)…

Languages differ greatly in how they express causal events. In languages like Japanese, the subjects of causative sentences, or "causers," are generally animate and intentional, whereas in other languages like English, causers range widely from animate beings to inanimate objects (e.g. Wolff, Jeon & Li, 2009). This paper explores…

This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly…

This is a naturalistic study of the development of language in Hebrew-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS) and children with Down syndrome (DS), whose MLU extended from 1[multiplied by]0 to 4[multiplied by]4. Developmental curves over the entire span of data collection revealed minor differences between children with WS, children with DS,…

When bilingual children enter formal reading education, host language proficiency becomes increasingly important. This study investigated the relation between socioeconomic status (SES), maternal language use, reading input, and vocabulary in a sample of 111 six-year-old children of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrant parents in the…