The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two…

Children's talk about the mind has been scarcely studied in non-English speakers. For this reason, this longitudinal study documents age-related changes in German-speaking children's internal state language. At 24, 30 and 36?months, children were administered general language tests and their internal state vocabulary levels were obtained via…

Home environment quality is a well-known predictor of school readiness (SR), although the underlying processes are little known. This study tested two hypotheses: (a) child language mediates the association between home characteristics (socioeconomic status and exposure to reading) and SR, and (b) genetic factors partly explain the association…

This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by…

Reviews the hypothesis, "phonological bootstrapping," that a purely phonological analysis of the speech signal may allow infants to start acquiring the lexicon and syntax of their native language. Study presents a model of phonological bootstrapping of the lexicon and syntax that helps illustrate the congruence between problems. Article argues…

Two studies investigated whether young children acquiring verbs at an exceptional rate can use the syntactic structure of familiar and unfamiliar verbs to make conjectures about some aspect of the meanings of those verbs. The preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, 1981) was used to set up a naturalistic pairing of scene and…

Examines infants' sensitivity to word units in fluent speech by inserting one-second pauses either at boundaries between successive words or between syllables within words. Results indicate that, by 11 months, infants are sensitive to word boundaries, and that this sensitivity depends on more than prosodic information or prior knowledge. (65…

Addresses phenomena exhibited by young children such as suffixed and free articles, double definiteness, genitives, pronouns, and "nominal style." Shows that analysis of these early data must invoke at least one functional projection above the noun phrase. Findings argue against any claim about the universal absence of functional…

Addresses how affective facial expression interacts with the linguistic forms in American Sign Language (ASL) motherese. The article presents data from both cross-sectional and longitudinal interaction from 15 deaf mothers signing with their deaf toddlers. Findings indicate a shift from affect to grammar at about the child's second birthday. (59…