Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front…

This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…

Examines four kinds of language learning-related behaviors (LLRBs) in the home conversations of 6 English children studied for 6 months from age 2.6 years. The role of LLRBs in frequency and range and in the frequency of grammatical productions during spontaneous revisions is addressed. (44 references) (GLR)

Eighteen cases of disintegrative psychosis (DP) were compared with 52 cases of infantile autism (IA) with speech loss and 145 IA cases without speech loss. DP cases showed clearer regression after more satisfactory development than the IA cases with speech loss, and by age seven were more severely retarded but similar in autistic symptomatology to…

It is possible to perform a structural analysis of similar conversations and define units within particular types of conversations to discover the regularities underlying the considerable variation in natural communication. Convergent communication consisting of an exchange of information in pursuit of a mutually agreed upon goal can be seen as a…

Twenty-four children aged five and twenty-four children aged six were interviewed individually three times during a calendar year. It was found that not only did the children's language develop over the period, as judged syntactically and lexically, but they also showed an increasingly fluent control over their own style. All the children…

Evidence shows that there are differences in the ways in which men and women speak. It has also been well documented that females are generally ahead of males in language acquisition and are less often diagnosed as speech pathologic. A review of the research gives some indication of the reasons for the development of sex differences in spoken…