This paper provides the first evidence of maternal speech--motherese--in Wichi, an indigenous language with a complex morphology spoken in the Gran Chaco region of Argentina. The corpus consists of 22 hours of video recordings from the daily life of three children, starting from their one-morpheme utterance period (MLU = 1) to the onset of…

The theme for this year's annual graduate student conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature (LLL) was "Your Voice, My Voice: Literature, Language, Culture and Society." Translation and interpretation guided the theme for the conference, with Dr. Marvin Puakea Nogelmeier of the Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian…

Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present…

While research on early simultaneous bilingual acquisition is well-documented, studies on multiple language acquisition in early childhood are still needed. Existing studies have mainly focused on early simultaneous acquisition of three or more languages. Some attention has already been paid to early pragmatic differentiation and cross-linguistic…

Major innovations are becoming available for research in language development and disorders. Among these innovations, recent tools allow naturalistic recording in children's homes and automated analysis to facilitate representative sampling. This study employed all-day recordings during the 2nd year of life in a child exposed to three languages,…

The present study investigates the degree to which social, experiential and usage-related factors correlate with Spanish linguistic competence among adult Hispanic Heritage Language (HL) speakers in the United States. Two online survey instruments were developed in furtherance of this research aim: a Likert-scale survey measuring five areas of…

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range=1;3-3;1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar…

Tests the hypothesis that mothers would label objects with adult-basic level terms when talking to other adults, but would label the same objects with child-basic terms when speaking to their young children who were just starting to talk, even though these labels may be very much "incorrect" by adult standards. (Author/RH)

Describes adjustments in speech patterns made by two- and three-year-olds when talking to their 14-month-old siblings and compares these changes with those made by mothers addressing their babies. Individual differences between the children indicate two types of influence on the adjustments made--pragmatic and emotional. (EKN)

Reports results of a longitudinal study of the acquisition of first words by 18 infants. Strategies used in word acquisition and environmental variables related to language development were investigated. Results were analyzed in terms of an interaction model of the language-learning process. (DP)

Seeks to determine how consistently a sample of hearing mothers using simultaneous communication to their deaf children signed what they said. Data indicate that the difficulty of simulaneously signing and saying the message predisposes the mothers toward inconsistent simplification in the signed input which may or may not be helpful for language…

Examines the conversation behavior of mothers toward their children with respect to two hypotheses: that the mothers' underlying interactional intent can be inferred from patterning in their conversation and that the utterances having a directive or controlling function will show a negative relationship to those designed to elicit conversation…

Argues that the measures of content and style of maternal talk used by the Murray and Trevarthen (1986) study of temporal patterning during vocal engagements did not directly indicate the ways in which the behaviors of the partners (mothers and infants) were combined on a moment-to-moment basis. (Author/CB)

A study of mother-child interaction focused on the contingent responses children make to various mother strategies to elicit language and the mothers' frequency of using that tactic. The subjects were six normal and four retarded children, matched for general language skills, and their mothers. Mother-child interactions videotaped at home were…