Research suggests that nonlinguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning (VSL) as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty-eight 8.5-month-old infants were presented with a…

Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk…

This study of 82 hearing-impaired children (ages 6 to 36 months) sought to provide normative data concerning their communication efforts and to document the course of development of these earliest communication efforts. The study found that certain cognitive abilities and strategies are prerequisite to the development of certain language…