Infants' preference for vowelharmony (VH, a phonotactic constraint that requires vowels in a word to be featurally similar) is thought to be language-specific: Monolingual infants learning VH languages show a listening preference for VH patterns by 6 months of age, while those learning non-VH languages do not (Gonzalez-Gomez et al., 2019; Van…

This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora -- one of child speech and one of adult speech -- specifically exploring whether words…

Language exerts a powerful influence on our concepts. We review evidence documenting the developmental origins of a precocious link between language and object categories in very young infants. This collection of studies documents a cascading process in which early links between language and cognition provide the foundation for later, more precise…

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…

Background: In recent years many studies have shown that the use of cochlear implants (CIs) improves children's skills in processing the auditory signal and, consequently, the development of both language comprehension and production. Nevertheless, many authors have also reported that the development of language skills in children with CIs is…

The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote…

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…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which…

Forty children, aged 1 ; 8-2 ; 0, participated in one of three training conditions meant to enhance their comprehension of the spatial term "under": the +Gesture group viewed a symbolic gesture for "under" during training; those in the +Photo group viewed a still photograph of objects in the "under" relationship; those in the Model Only group did…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…

In a landmark study, Jusczyk and Aslin (1995 ) demonstrated that English-learning infants are able to segment words from continuous speech at 7.5 months of age. In the current study, we explored the possibility that infants segment words from the edges of utterances more readily than the middle of utterances. The same procedure was used as in…

Examined children's tendency to make argument structure overgeneralization errors. Found that 3- to 8-year-olds were more likely to overgeneralize verbs less familiar to them, supporting the hypothesis that verb usage in particular construction types becomes entrenched over time. As children learn transitivity status of particular verbs, they…

There are reasons to believe that infant-directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech. One group of infants heard a set of nonsense…

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in…