What makes a word easy to learn? Early-learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We…

This longitudinal study (data collected from 2019 to 2023) examines the relation between Spanish-English bilingual Latino toddlers' (n=46; F=22; M=24) early gesture production (Mage=18.67 months; SD[subscript age]=1.02) and later language skills (M[subscript age]=36.87 months; SD[subscript age]=0.81). Video recordings at child-age 18-months…

In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. This process of early phonetic learning has traditionally been framed as phonetic category acquisition. However, recent studies have hypothesized that the attunement may instead reflect a perceptual space learning process that does not…

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…

We trained a computational model (the Chunk-Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child-caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism--backward transitional probability--is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We…

Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…

Evidence shows individual variation in lexical acquisition as a function of socioeconomic status and linguistic input. Research has primarily involved English-speaking populations and considered only mothers' child-directed speech. This study analyzes the effects of socioeconomic status on quantitative and qualitative properties of linguistic…

Certain structures are particularly challenging for children. Explanations of such challenges reference both grammatical development and processing capacities. This study concerns production-specific considerations. Sixteen adults and 72 children from ages 3;01 to 8;11 participated in an experiment designed to elicit imitation of one-, two-, and…

What is the function of babbling in language learning? We examined the structure of parental speech as a function of contingency on infants' non-cry prelinguistic vocalizations. We analyzed several acoustic and linguistic measures of caregivers' speech. Contingent speech was less lexically diverse and shorter in utterance length than…

Linguistic input in multi-lingual/-cultural contexts is highly variable. We examined the production of English and Malay laterals by fourteen early bilingual preschoolers in Singapore who were exposed to several allophones of coda laterals: Malay caregivers use predominantly clear-l in English and Malay, but their English coda laterals can also be…

Emerging evidence suggests domain-general processes, including working memory, may contribute to reduced speech production skills in young children. This study compared the phonological short-term (pSTM) and phonological working memory (pWM) abilities of 50 monolingual English-speaking children between 3;6 and 5;11 with typical speech production…

Prior research has extensively explored audiovisual speech perception and literacy skills in various linguistic contexts. Studies have shown that children's ability to integrate auditory and visual speech cues plays a crucial role in language acquisition and development (Erdener & Burnham, 2013; Lalonde & Werner, 2021). Furthermore,…

Maternal depression and anxiety are potential risk factors to children's language environments and development. Though existing work has examined relations between these constructs, further work is needed accounting for both depression and anxiety and using more direct measures of the home language environment and children's language development.…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old's speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children's Mental Transformation…