This article evaluates the acquisition of directionals in Q'anjob'al, a Western Mayan language of Guatemala. The data come from a longitudinal study of two Q'anjob'al monolingual children of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala: Xhuw (1;9-2;5) and Xhim (2;3-3;5). The results show how these children acquire the morphological distribution of…

This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases…

This study investigated family and coach responses to a two-year community-based research program, Strong Beginnings for Babies (SBB), designed to support families in fostering infant language development. The study focused on families of infants from low-income backgrounds, as these children may be at risk for delayed language development. The…

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object--word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids)…

Before infants produce words, they can discriminate changes in motion event components such as manner (how an action is performed) and path (trajectory of an action). Individual differences in nonlinguistic event categorization are related to children's later verb comprehension (Konishi, Stahl, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2016). We asked: (a) Do…

Infants start learning words, the building blocks of language, at least by 6 months. To do so, they must be able to extract the phonological form of words from running speech. A rich literature has investigated this process, termed word segmentation. We addressed the fundamental question of how infants of different ages segment words from their…

In the current study, we examined the developmental course of the perception of non-native tonal contrast. We tested 4, 6 and 12-month-old Dutch infants on their discrimination of Chinese low-rising tone and low-dipping tone using the visual fixation paradigm. The infants were tested in two conditions that differed in terms of degree of…

The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4-2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across 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…

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.…