The influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream, in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we…

Reports a study which examines some of the properties of objects to determine whether the number of different examples of an object concept presented to infants influences concept learning and generalization and to discover whether children's behavior and language in relation to new objects influence learning the concept and generalization to new…

Examined the nature of infants' development of social knowledge and the role of caregivers' verbal responses to requests in learning about self and others. Found that, as indicated by changes in request-making behavior, children's conceptualization of the role of self in making requests changes with age; the nature of children's conceptualization…

The first part of this bibliography contains annotations of articles on the acquisition of voice onset time (VOT) as the marker of a phonological contrast, that is, the studies concern children who are already developing a phonological system. The most common questions are the following: (1) When children begin to produce initial stops, how are…

A study is undertaken to determine whether the nonlinguistic priority of the agent of an action facilitates the comprehension of word reference. The subjects were twelve male and twelve female infants at the one word stage of language production. The children were presented with three nonsense names (presented as part of a narration of a filmed…

This report surveys writings by National Institute of Mental Health grant recipients who have investigated this first five years of life. The authors attempted to identify and correlate ideas, themes, perspectives and issues which can be useful in the formulation and evaluation of social policies related to infant and child development. Major…