Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in auditory word recognition skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children's auditory skills and various linguistic skills, including phonology, although in some languages only. However, language-specific features influence…

Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…

Infants are thought to be sensitive to frequency in the input as a cue for phonological development. However, linguistic biases such as phonological markedness have been argued to play a role too. Since frequency and markedness are correlated, the two assertions could be different interpretations of data that confound frequency and markedness. In…

The present study examined continuity/discontinuity and stability/instability of noun and verb production measures in 30 child-mother dyads observed at 16 and 20 months, and predictive relations with the acquisition of nouns and verbs at 24 months. Children exhibited significant discontinuity and robust stability in the frequency of nouns and…

Examination of infant vocalization patterns across interactive and noninteractive contexts may facilitate better understanding of early communication development. In the current study, with 24 infant-parent dyads, infant volubility increased significantly when parent interaction ceased (presenting a "still face," or SF) after a period of…