In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

Non-tone language infants' native language recognition is based first on supra-segmental then segmental cues, but this trajectory is unknown for tone-language infants. This study investigated non-tone (English) and tone (Thai) language 6- to 10-month-old infants' preference for English vs. Thai one-syllable words (containing segmental and tone…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

Late exposure to the first language, as in the case of deaf children with hearing parents, hinders the production of linguistic expressions, even in adulthood. Less is known about the development of language soon after language exposure and if late exposure hinders all domains of language in children and adults. We compared late signing adults and…

We present an artificial language experiment investigating (i) how speakers of languages such as English with two-way obligatory distinctions between singular and plural learn a system where singular and plural are only optionally marked, and (ii) how learners extend their knowledge of the plural morpheme when under the scope of negation without…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children's detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with…

These studies tested two questions about the developmental origins of children's sensitivity to iconicity with regard to number gestures: (1) whether children initially learn number gestures with sensitivity to the one-to-one correspondence between fingers and quantities or whether they learn them as unanalyzed symbols; and (2) whether sensitivity…

Prior research on ambient-language effects in babbling has often suggested infants produce language-specific phonological features within the first year. These results have been questioned in research failing to find such effects and challenging the positive findings on methodological grounds. We studied English- and Chinese-learning infants at 8,…

Research has shown that young infants use contrasting acoustic information to distinguish consonants. This has been used to argue that by 12 months, infants have homed in on their native language sound categories. However, this ability seems to be positionally constrained, with contrasts at the beginning of words (onsets) discriminated earlier.…

A major problem in second language acquisition (SLA) is the segmentation of fluent speech in the target language, i.e., detecting the boundaries of phonological constituents like words and phrases in the speech stream. To this end, among a variety of cues, people extensively use prosody and statistical regularities. We examined the role of pitch,…