Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months…

Examining how bilingual infants experience their dual language input is important for understanding bilingual language acquisition. To assess these language experiences, researchers typically conduct language interviews with caregivers. However, little is known about the reliability of these parent reports in describing how bilingual children…

Children's development of the functional category of articles can be explained in two ways. One approach assumes that children are equipped with innate knowledge of the category, while the other assumes that children's early articles are limited-scope formulae. Using Eisenbeiss's (2000) criteria for determining the status of DPs, developed for a…

This study tested the impact of child-directed language input on language development in Spanish-English bilingual infants (N = 25, 11- and 14-month-olds from the Seattle metropolitan area), across languages and independently for each language, controlling for socioeconomic status. Language input was characterized by social interaction variables,…

Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of "comprehension" of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood,…

Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this…

We investigated longitudinal relations among gaze following and face scanning in infancy and later language development. At 12 months, infants watched videos of a woman describing an object while their passive viewing was measured with an eye-tracker. We examined the relation between infants' face scanning behavior and their tendency to follow the…

Purpose: In this study, the authors explored whether French-learning infants use nonadjacent phonotactic regularities in their native language, which they learn between the ages of 7 and 10 months, to segment words from fluent speech. Method: Two groups of 20 French-learning infants were tested using the head-turn preference procedure at 10 and 13…

Acquisition of regular inflectional suffixes is an integral part of grammatical development in English and delayed acquisition of certain inflectional suffixes is a hallmark of language impairment. We investigate the relationship between input frequency and grammatical suffix acquisition, analyzing 217 transcripts of mother-child (ages 1 ; 11-6 ;…

This study examined whether 12-month-olds will accept words that differ phonologically and phonetically from their native language as object labels in an associative learning task. Sixty infants were presented with sets of English word-object (N = 30), Japanese word-object (N = 15), or Czech word-object (N = 15) pairings until they habituated.…

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English- and German-, but not French-learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish-learning infants' lexical stress preferential…

The phonetic characteristics of canonical babbling produced by Korean- and English-learning infants were compared with consonant and vowel frequencies observed in infant-directed speech produced by Korean- and English-speaking mothers. For infant output, babbling samples from six Korean-learning infants were compared with an existing English…

Using a name-based categorization task, Nazzi found in 2005 that French-learning 20-month-olds can make use of one-feature consonantal contrasts between new labels but fail to do so with one-feature vocalic contrasts. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels at…

Researchers have long been puzzled by children's variable omission of grammatical morphemes, often attributing this to a lack of semantic or syntactic competence. Recent studies suggest that some of this variability may be due to phonological constraints. This paper explored this issue further by conducting a longitudinal study of five…

Past research has indicated that English-learning infants begin segmenting words from speech by 7.5 months of age (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). More recent work has demonstrated, however, that 7.5-month-olds' segmentation abilities are severely limited. For example, the ability to segment vowel-initial words from speech reportedly does not appear until…