Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…

Purpose: Previous studies reported that children acquire Cantonese tones before 3 years of age, supporting the assumption in models of phonological development that suprasegmental features are acquired rapidly and early in children. Yet, recent research found a large disparity in the age of Cantonese tone acquisition. This study investigated…

Children and adults participated in two speech perception experiments in which they listened to recorded consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words in random order and resPonded by indicating which number of a word-pair they had heard. Some but not all stimuli that were intended to induce perceptual cross-over were successful in getting subjects to…

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)

Reports on two experiments, one performed on infants, the other on adults, designed to examine the issue of categorical perception of speech contrasts in infants in relation to linguistic processing and the innateness theory of speech perception. (AM)