Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

This study is a systematic analysis of the information content of a wide range of distributional cues to word boundaries, individually and in combination, in naturally occurring child-directed speech across three languages (English, Polish, and Turkish). The paper presents a series of statistical analyses examining the relative predictive strength…

The study evaluated whether durational and allophonic cues to word boundaries are intrinsic to syllable production, and so acquired with syllable structure, or whether they are suprasyllabic, and so acquired in phrasal contexts. Twenty preschool children (aged 3 ; 6 and 4 ; 6) produced: (1) single words with simple and complex onsets (e.g. "nail"…

Study of the phonological systems in the language of twins, two-and-a-half years old. (VM)

Comparison of Italian and English-speaking children's (N=200) segmentation abilities indicated that the discrepancies between the language groups reflected the children's phonologic and orthographic differences. (CB)

Investigates the utterances of 1 French and 1 U.S. infant at 0; 5,0; 8,0; 11, and 12 by transcribing and acoustically analyzing them for syllable duration and vowel format values. The French-learning infant tended to produce more regularly timed nonfinal syllables and showed significantly more final-syllable lengthening than the English-learning…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether individual differences observed in the grammatical morphology of children with specific language impairment (SLI) could be traced to another source, such as the use of weak syllables. Results show that imitations in prosody may restrict the degree of grammatical morpheme use by children with SLI.…

Toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared on three global measures of phonological behavior to age-mates with normal speech development. The measures were the average level of complexity of syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in…

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable[right arrow]onset-rime[right arrow]phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English…