When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by a range of register-typical characteristics. Many of those can be objectively measured, such as acoustic-prosodic and structural-linguistic modifications. Perceived vocal affect, however, is a socio-emotional IDS characteristic and is subjectively assessed. Vocal affect goes beyond acoustic-prosodic…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

This article discusses whether digital visual and audio feedback in learners' own voices improves their perception and production of lexical tones in Chinese as a foreign language. Forty-four beginners participated in a four-week training focused on the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese tones at the word level. Half received digital feedback…

Background and Aims: This longitudinal study investigated the language skills, phonological working memory and lexical-tone perception of Mandarin-speaking late-talkers (LTs) and those with typical language development (TLD) at 27 months, while also examining their connections with novel word-referent mapping (W-R mapping) through eye-tracking at…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…